[Neil Sadwelkar]

One more thing. If you’re using an M1 Mac with MacOS 12 Monterey, make sure the RAID you’re considering has M1 drivers. There are a couple of RAIDs models that either don’t work with M1 systems, or work with very slow write performance.

I think you may find a discussion own this on this forum some months ago.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

For Redmag offloads I’ve used 2.5″ SSDs in 2.5″ USB 3 enclosures. These provide up to 500+ MB/sec write speeds and they do not throttle even after 30+ mins of continuous write. Just get the right SSD. Crucial MX500, Samsung 850, WD Blue are all fine.

For Alexa LF/35 shoots, 2.5″ SSDs may not keep up if the shoot is over 2 hrs per day. Then you need NVMe SSDs which are notorious for thermal throttling depending on model.

But 2.5″ SSDs are fine for quick (Redmag) offload as well as transcoding to dailies off the SSD.

But for long term storage you need to get a spinning drive and/or a RAID. The new 16TB and higher drives are very fast and can write at 250 MB/sec till the half way mark.

4-bay Thunderbolt 3 RAIDs from Sandisk (previously G-Tech), LaCie, Promise are fast too. 400-600 MB/sec write. Some OWC RAID models are software RAIDs, which in my experience are fine, but some say they are unreliable.

The new 8-bay RAIDs from Symply are amazingly fast, and small with a great hard case included.

Offload from Red card to 2.5″ SSD, and simultaneously to RAID is very fast, and I’ve used Hedge write them at like speeds.

For even longer term storage, after all deliverables are made, consider LTO backup so you can recycle the RAIDs for another job.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Which version of Bru and which version of MacOS are you on?

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Back to my Mac has been discontinued. Apple Remote Desktop, or other apps like TeamViewer, Anydesk etc let you remote control your Mac from elsewhere but don’t offer a smooth picture and sound in sync experience. Or video quality. I’ve tested others like NoMachine, or Parsec, that work but are a bit clunky.

With Jump Desktop, and preferably a Mac wired to the Internet, I’m experienced nearly ‘being there’ experience. I could demo it to you. Its free to install for the system being controlled. It costs for the one controlling. I have a license.

I helped an editor in NY convert a project from Premiere Pro to Avid remotely by taking control of his Mac. It was almost like ‘being there’ with Jump Desktop.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Its over a month since your post, so I’m guessing you’ve found the editor/s you needed.

But in case you didn’t, I’ve had great success editing remotely on DaVinci Resolve using Jump desktop. So, in case you don’t find someone in your immediate area, you could consider someone from elsewhere, maybe even a different country.

And even if your system is not free in the day, that remote editor could be in a different time zone so s/he can work own your system at night when you aren’t using it.

Alternately, you can do a hybrid workflow where you have a copy of the media and database on a drive attached to your system, and the remote editor works at their system with a clone of your drive. And you use a sync software to keep the databases in sync.

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

OWC also have a 4-bay 2.5″ drive RAID that’s sold as empty or with drives. Its the OWC Thunderbay 4 mini here (https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/thunderbay-4-mini/thunderbolt-3). You can get this with SoftRAID and create a software RAID5. I have one of these but am not using it as a RAID but individual SSDs.

Another thought came to me that since you need something to use with your LTO drive, then maybe you have a spare SAS port on your SAS adapter. In which case you could consider the tiny SilverStone Technology RL-TS421S SST-TS421S 4 Bay 2.5″ SAS/SATA Hard Drive Enclosure. Its $ 221 on Amazon and you can put in 4 drives and run it as RAID0 for maximum speed (but no safety)

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

There are a couple of possibilities if you’d like to avoid SSDs as they don’t have useful capacities for LTO intermediate storage at an affordable cost.

I use a couple of solutions when I have to backup client data that comes on portable 4-5 TB drives that aren’t as fast as an LTO can write. I back them up to a 4-bay Thunderbolt3 RAID, or I a 2-bay RAID0. I know, a RAID0 isn’t safe but since this is only an intermediate backup of material that exists elsewhere, its fine.

A 4-bay Stardom RAID5 over Thunderbolt 3 given me 650 MB/sec write and 750 MB/sec read when empty. This RAID has 4x16TB drives as RAID5. As the drive fills up, it gets slower but even at 80% full, it still provides a respectable 450 MB/sec write and 550 MB/sec read.

A newer 36TB G-RAID0 can do 470 MB/sec write and 500 MB/sec read, so that could also be a fast intermediate drive.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

You’re playing a complex collection of formats, frame rates, and processing of images. Both your drives have more than enough speed to mathematically accommodate the required data rate.

So, there are likely to be one (or both) of the following factors

CPU-GPU speed in processing all these in real time

Drive latency, which limits a drive’s ability to read many small files in succession, quickly enough.

An example of latency and the limits it imposes, is a drive that can easily play one uncompressed video of, say, 2GB needing about 200 MB/sec data rate, finds it hard to play a 2GB image sequence of thousands of 7 MB files.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

There are many options for cloud data storage services, and you can check them one by one for the fees in your country – Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, are the common ones, and Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Wasabi are the more ‘pro’ ones. Check on Wasabi’s web site for a cost comparison between Wasabi and others.

One thing to bear in mind with most cloud services is that they have ‘storage fees’ per month based on how much you’re storing, and ‘egress’ fees means fees per GB for how much you download. Even if you download the same files/folders over and over again, you get charged as often as you download your own data.

So, in my opinion, for 3 TB of data which is likely to increase, you’re better off getting a drive as a backup, and then keeping a clone of this drive at another location, and using a sync service like Resilio to keep them both in sync. Or even physically carrying the ‘off site’ drive to the other drive’s location, syncing them and then moving them apart.

Or, you could get a personal cloud kind of device which is a cloud connected hard drive, and have your own cloud. WD makes such personal cloud devices on which you can add your own drive.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

You mentioned you were looking for something that runs on Linux. Neither Canister not Yoyotta will run on Linux.

Anyway, whatever you get for writing to LTO, consider getting an indexing software like NeoFinder or DiskCatalogmaker. These can ‘scan’ a finished LTO and save an offline copy of all file and folder structures without any data from them. Like an offline Finder which lets you browse a drive even when the drive is not mounted to the system.

So, you could store indexes or catalogs of, say, a hundred LTOs and then search for a file or folder across all of them and then restore it faster.

Canister also has an indexing and an offline search feature, but NeoFinder or DiskCatalogMaker is more useful as it can also scan drives, RAIDs etc.