[Valentin Struklec]

First of all:

Thank you guys for all the response. They have been read multiple times and have already helped us a lot. After doing some more research and testing we changed the setup quite a bit..

Adaptec also told us that their caching abilty would not help in our case. It is primarily focused on sequential reading 🙁

Our current Setup is using 24x 2tb HDDs with the adaptec raid controller +expander.

HDDS: https://www.hgst.com/hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/enterprise-sata-drives/ultrastar-7k4000

In theory this should give us more performance than dual 10gb is able to handle. Nevertheless tests like the one from tomshardware keep us worried:

https://www.tomshardware.de/RAID_Controller-SAS-PCIe-SSD-Cache,testberichte-241198-9.html

Its in german but the third picture would represent our setup..
In their test setup 8hdds are providing 300-500 mb/s. Not very satisfying 🙂

We also decided to go with WinServer 2012 R2 and Win8.1 as suggested by a couple of people on StudioSysAdmins.

Again: Any Input is highly appreciated 🙂

Many thanks from Austria

Valentin

[Valentin Struklec]

Thanks for the replies. The system needs to be up and running in march, so we will start buying the parts in January. We haven’t bought anything yet. Luckily we have enough time to set it up properly and do some tweaks before production starts.

[Valentin Struklec]

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your thoughts.

[Alex Gerulaitis] “That’s 1.5GB/s assuming 30fps”

I think I forgot to clarify that we are doing compositing not editing. It will be a handdrawn cartoon feature layered in After Effects, which means we won’t have to stream the raw material in real time. Nevertheless performance is key to getting the work done. With anything around 1000mb/s I would be very happy and I am hoping that we will be in that region. But I did have problems with performance and file sequences in the past. Never with a windows system though.

[Alex Gerulaitis] “why not ask Adaptec?”

We also asked adaptec about their new controller series. I will let you know as soon as they respond.

Unfortunately there are not a lot of people around who have experience with this in Austria, so I was not able to find someone with the expertise to give me some advice 🙂 We do have companies that are specialised on editing workflows but no infrastructure providers for the VFX/Compositing Area.

[Alex Gerulaitis] “(2) 10GbE cards and their performance,”

I have not played with 10GbE yet, but from what I have read it seems to be doing not to bad.
Honestly I am more worried about IOPS and the performance of the system going down with more than 2-3 users constantly streaming data.

Linux is an option. I believe I would have to invest a lot more time in that case, but it may be the smarter choice 😉

Anyways, thx for the feedback and we will keep you guys updated 🙂

Valentin