Tom Bridges
Forum Replies Created
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[Bob Zelin] “ATTO AINT READY”
Hi Bob,
Atto’s Celerity 42ES dual 4GB fibre card is working perfectly in our new Quad, despite very poor advertising by Atto. WIth an Infortrend 16 drive SATA-Fibre RAID, we’re getting very solid performance. I’ve completely filled the array and we’re still getting reads of 440-730MB/s and writes of 640-660MB/s.
I agree though, generally. It’s pretty bleeding edge and – ideally – you’d want someone to test it first before diving in. Lucky for us, the the water’s warm …
Best,
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk -
I’ll second this. We were told by Blackmagic on the 20th October that:
[Grant Petty] “Multibridge Extreme has been delayed and has not shipped yet. The good news is we are just about complete on this product, and think it’s only a week or two away at the most. We are starting to build production units today. However we want to make sure everything is well tested before shipping, so we expect another week of testing before everything is checked out.
I will let you know over the next week or two as the new PCIe versions of our products are released.”
I think that’s a pretty clear statement that the units would be shipping by the 10th November at the very latest. This clearly hasn’t happened. What irritates me more is that there’s a clear commitment to keep us informed, which has been reneged on. Posts by myself and others have been ignored in this forum.
We have – rashly I know – made a hardware investment by buying a Quad. This decision (2.7 vs Quad) was made on the basis of information supplied by Blackmagic. Yes, it was stupid of us, but when a company’s CEO goes on record, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the company can deliver on its promises.
I think we’d all appreciate some clarification as to what the situation with the Multibridge is, what’s gone wrong, and when we can expect shipping. After the first Multibridge debacle, I really didn’t expect something similar …
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk -
No problem David. It’s looking like a pretty robust system: when completely full, the disk speeds aren’t seriously affected. Minimum reads is at 340MB/s (max 720MB/s!) and writes slightly higher (640-660MB/s). Which is a bit weird, really. I look forward to getting my hands on some Blackmagic hardware so I can run the Speed Test utility. As I mentioned, this is all done with Quickbench. The precise RAID configuration is two RAID 5 volumes (with hot spare), which is then software striped using Disk Utility. I’m going to run a redundancy test when I have a moment.
Best wishes,
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk -
So I’ve filled the RAID up to over 80%. For the reads, it’s benching between 400MB/s and 700MB/s whilst writes are between 600-640MB/s. I’ll fill it to the brim and see what happens.
Hope this helps,
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk -
[Gary Taylor] “Did you give any thought the implementing one of these? I am wondering if the ASIC would compensate for the overhead for RAID 6 writes.”
Haven’t tried RAID 6 yet. Not entirely sure how it works, actually. I believe the idea is that there are two sets of parity, so any two drives can fail? Something like that. In any case, we’re not willing to sacrifice space and performance to that extent: one hot spare is enough. If I get time, I’ll do the tests.
[David Cherniack] “A complaint I’ve heard about the Infotrend raids is the variation – “all over the map” is how one dealer who evaluated the system put it. The average is still good, but not if it dips to 200MB/S in the valleys. So please know how far it dipped as well as at 80% full when you can do the test.”
Good point. The lowest I’ve got out of the RAID 50 through Quickbench is 425MB/s. So still substantial variation but definitely in the safe zone. I’m experimenting with different stripe sizes at the moment to see if that affects performance/variation.
Best,
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk -
The bare box was
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No. This is on a completely clean array, so I’d expect the numbers to go down as it fills up. Apart from anything else, I don’t have a spare 4TB of data hanging around … will post back once we’ve loaded all our footage onto it, which was about 3hrs of HDCAM SR.
cheers,
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk -
Yes there is an OS X driver – it’s just not labelled as such! We’re running the Celerity 2.30 drivers without any problem.
We paid
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Hi Rory,
I know that Video Rescue here in the UK spec Infortrend boxes. The downside, as always, with building it yourself is the support issue.
That said, we’ve already taken the plunge. I’ve got a 4TB box sitting in front of me! Our Quad has just shipped, so I’ll let you know how we get on with it.
Hope all’s well with you,
Tom
Split Image
http://www.split-image.co.uk