[Neil Sadwelkar]

Did this get sorted eventually? I’m curious because the speeds for write and read you’re getting are unusual.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I don’t have direct experience with the BM Multi-dock, but I have a large collection of USB-C Thunderbolt 3 SSD enclosures and even multi-bay SSD enclosures, so I’m reasonably certain it will work just as well as any other enclosure. Its rack mount and has a built-in power supply so it seems to be made for pro use.

It’s not clear from your mail if you’re using an intel Mac or a M1 Mac. The reason for knowing that is that, M1 MacBooks have some issues with external USB-C SSDs. They seem slower than Intel MacBooks. Even with RAIDs, M1 MacBooks and Mac Minis have mixed reviews.

So, if are using an M1 MBP, then if possible check your LaCie 2Big dock with an Intel Mac, just to be sure.

The sleep issue you’re seeing is unusual. We have used LaCie 2Big docks in the field to offload camera cards and they’ve run for hours without any slowdowns.

As for editing and working 4k (vs HD) it also matters what codec you’re working with. Many compressed codecs like XAVC-S, XF-AVC and others, don’t have huge data rates so, a 2-drive RAID 0 should really suffice for those codecs. Unless your input media is Red Raw, or Sony Raw, or Alexa Raw in which case, a 2-drive RAID 0 may be insufficient.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Your iMac USB-C port is actually a Thunderbolt 3 port.

The USB drives you have, if they are portable drives, then they will top out at about 120 MB/sec, and if they are desktop drives, then they may go up to 200 MB/sec or more depending on model.

You do get USB-C to 4-port hubs where the USB ports are USB-A USB 3.0 ports, so, totally about 600 MB/sec shared between 4 ports.

If you connect 4 portable drives via USB-A to USB-C cables to this kind of a hub, you’ll still see full speed on all 4 drives. Even if you connect 4 desktop drives to this hub, you’ll still see full speed on all 4 drives as long as not more than 2 drives are simultaneously reading or writing.

If you need even more speed or of any of your USB-C devices are SSDs or RAIDs, then you can look at getting a Thunderbolt to USB hub. Caldigit, Sonnet, and OWC make them.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I don’t have any direct experience archiving in Linux.

I’ve always used MacOS. So, my advice would be to get any Mac even a used one, and use that for archiving. I have a 11″ MacBook Air with 4GB RAM and that’s been used for backing up many LTO tapes, in the field too. Right now I use a Mac mini for LTO work.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Back in the day (2010-11) I used to work at a place which had Bru Server and a tape library. When the library stopped working, they switched to Bru PE and a single tape drive.

I still have a working Bru system and a compatible LTO-6 and LTO-8 drives to be able to restore the occasional Bru tape.

In your case, since you think the LTO drive may be the issue, if you can borrow another LTO drive and have the necessary interface to connect to it, then you could test and see if it works.

My advice is, if you have a working Bru installation, then don’t bother with Argest. Bru will work just fine for tape restores.

For your 488 Bru tapes, you may want to, in the long run, migrate them to LTFS and LTO-8.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

For exactly what you need, H.264 is fine. Give it a decent data rate and it will be visually indistinguishable from ProRes at a much smaller file size. H.265 or HEVC is even more efficient, and supports HDR, but is more challenging to edit.

What’s a good data rate? Depends on the resolution.

For HD it should be around 20 Mbps, for 4k/UHD, 80 Mbps

To give you a sense of file sizes,

1 hr of HD ProResHQ is about 80 GB, as H.264 20 Mbps, its 9 GB.

1 hr of UHD ProResHQ is about 320 GB, as H.264 80 Mbps, its 36 GB

Davinci Resolve can do a good anything to H.264 mov conversion, as will Apple Compressor, or EditReady. If you want to be cross platform, then make the H.264 files .mxf

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’m not sure about Active, but Symply are definitely operational. Their Spark series of RAIDs, shared storage Workspace XE, and LTO drives are readily available. Even in India. I own a Symply Pro LTO which works directly on Thunderbolt 3, and is much quieter than my older IBM LTO drives. I’ve used their Spark RAID for a project, and it works well too.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

You need to first isolate which of the two has issues, the M1 Pro MacBook Pro or the Synology. If you have access to a different Mac, preferably an Intel one, you could try accessing the Synology files from that. If the issues persist, then you’ll have to figure out what has changed in the Synology to make its performance change.

If, the Intel Mac has the exact same issue, then try working without the TB3-10GigE adapter, use a common TB3-GigE adapter.

There have been issues reported with the Thunderbolt/USB performance of external devices with M1 systems. I have a 13″ M1 MBP and 16″ M1 Max MBP. And in both, the external TB3/USB devices perform at speeds less than Intel Mac. In fact, some RAIDs don’t even work with the M1.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

After you import an art file and place it in a track, the inspector shows two sections – ‘Caption’ and ‘Style’. In the ‘Caption’ section, if ‘Use track style’ is checked, then you can go to the ‘Style’ section and make changes which affect all subtitles.

But, if you go to a specific subtitle, select it, and then in ‘Caption’ deselect ‘Use track style’. Now, in the ‘Caption’ tab, new Caption Style options appear. Any changes you make here affect only the selected subtitle.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

If its an Intel Mac, with or without Monterey, then the Sonnet Solo seem to work fine. But with the new M1 systems, there appears to be poor performance.