[Mike Nicolau]

oh…and I understand that advertised speeds don’t hold up in day to day use but very few codecs in use today achieve data rates of more than 100MB/s. So what am I missing for a smooth editing experience, processing power ?

[Mike Nicolau]

Thanks for the fast advice.

3) Which are the specs that affect speed the most, the card’s processor, the RAM of the card ?

I was actually only referring to the RAID card’s specs not the computer in which it is installed. RAID 0 was referred to just as an example, I just wanted to know if the number of drives affects the array’s speed.

I want to start out with an internal RAID array. The solutions that you recommended are for external enclosures am I correct ?
So one of these cards would do :
https://www.attotech.com/products/category.php?id=1&catid=10
and not this kind, which is just an adapter to bring more ports into the system ?
https://www.attotech.com/products/category.php?id=1&catid=3

thanks,
Mike

[Mike Nicolau]

Repeating the above poster question. Is it better to go with the default 2.2 for web viewing or is it a good choice for a 2.4 gamma if for example grading some video material ?

[Mike Nicolau]

I only found the Mac version on their site.

[Mike Nicolau]

\thanks for all the answers. I finally bought an intel raid controller. Could you tell me a program that accurately measures the data transfer of my HDDs ? I tried Iometer but I don’t know if I chose the right settings. I have to find some tutorials for it.

[Mike Nicolau]

Thanks,
I’ll go with a promise then

[Mike Nicolau]

Thank you both for the lengthy and patient answers.
Bob believe me i’m not trying to do anything on my own and know that trying to do everything by yourself leads to doing nothing right but one week ago when people started telling me about SANs NAS etc. I realised I need to have at least a basic grasp of what these terms mean before I start looking for the people who offer this solutions to the market. So now I at least can have a conversation on common grounds with any storage manufacturer. I also have the utmost respect for the people with the experience and know how of making these systems work together and integrating them into the right workflow.
So…that being clarified my need for such high speeds come from the fact that i’ll be working with up to 4K resolution material and speed hungry formats like DPXs and such. Maybe not 800 read/writes but somewhere close to that.
I’ve found some SAN systems that claim they can achieve this speeds and i’ll look into it is the CalDigit solution can also support this.

The reason I was asking so many questions about your “building your own SAN” tutorial is because I might even want to go with this solution for a personal project and because there was this user saying this:
“EXCELLENT article, thanks for sharing! My studio has a very similar setup to the one you describe in this article. The primary difference is:

– No MetaLAN software (which appears to be Windows only)

– No 4-port ethernet card on the server. All machines (xserve and 8 Mac Pro clients) use the included 2-port ethernet cards, aggregated into single 2Gbe connections

– PROAVIO EditBox EB8ML 8-drive array in RAID 5 mode

Using this setup, we get 70-90MB/s connections on all machines, depending on which speed tests you trust more (Aja Performance Test vs. Blackmagic Disc Test).

I was wondering, is there a particular benefit to using the 4-port card vs. this setup? We do get rare situations where a workstation will suddenly slow to a crawl, usually when 5 or more people are working on the same project/footage. Would you guess this has more to do with the lack of a 4-port server card, or more to do with sharing assets with no SAN software in the mix?”

and I would just simply like to understand how did he also got this speeds and what are the drawbacks of his systems.
As to my “link aggregation” concept misunderstandings there was this other user who commented on your article:

“Fantastic article, but there’s one very important thing you left out. If it’s a small shop with 4 edit stations or less, you do NOT need nor want Link Aggregation.

For a 4 station setup, what you do is assign one port to each client and use subnet masking so that each port is on it’s own virtual private network. You can use any cheap gigabit switch, or no switch at all (just plug it straight in). This will give the identical performance, without the headache or extra cost of doing Link Aggregation. Link aggregation balances all the links to all the clients, so it’s useful if you have more clients than you do ports on the server. But if you have 4 or less stations and 4 ports, it’s pointless.

Another thing. If you aggregate 4 ports, you don’t exactly get a single 4gbps port as you suggested. Instead you get up to 4 sessions at 1gbps max each. In other words, say you use Link Aggregation on a Mac client and link 4 ports together. Then connect to a server that also has 4 linked ports. Your max bandwidth for a single video stream is still only 1gbps.

Just wanted to clear that up. When I first heard of Link Aggregation, I too thought it was the same a having a 4gb ethernet connection. Unfortunately it’s not the case.”

Again i’m not trying to question your methods i’m just respectfully asking if it’s possible for some clarifications about this.

Also on my question about whether it’s possible to build such a system around a PC server you answered no, but reading the article again I saw that it is also possible to have a PC act as the server ?

best,
Mike