Answering your hardware questions!

[Daniel Macleod]

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiond500p.html

Well, I run two raids in raid0, one is a clone of the first. As a back-up. Has served me well so far.
After completion of a project I put it on a LTO.

So I'm after the size and the speed. And nobody has explained the practical differense between those two types of discs in that regard to me.

Thanks
Martin

Great thanks, so it seems to be that you are running in raid 10. With Raid 10 having built in redundancy, reliability is less of an issue because you are not going to lose all of your data if a drive were to fail. So to answer your question if you are running your array in raid 10 I wouldn't see to much a problem with using the Hitachi's, especially if you are only running for only a year. But honestly if you aren't planning on swapping out the drives next year I wouldn't go with consumer drives. It always seems so tempting to use the consumer drives because of their attractive price point, but sometimes the reliability and performance of a enterprise drive is the better solution. If your going to be using this system for long term I would recommend Western Digitals RE4 WD, which may only be 2TB's but probably offer double the performance of the Hitachi drives. If you don't mind maybe replacing maybe one of the drives once and a while, need the space and can't afford the enterprise drives then sure go for the Consumer drives. If you afford the Enterprise drives then just spend the money and do it right the first time. Here is a list of what I think the pros and cons of each are and I will let you decide which you think is better for you.

3TB Consumer Drive.
Pros:
Massive 3TB storage
Very inexpensive
Decent reliability
Cons:
Probably will run hotter
Consume more power
Not as reliable
Still new to the market so we don't know to much about their long term reliability.
5400RPM

2TB Enterprise drive.
Pros:
Very fast
Very durable
7200RPM
64MB cache
Install and forget
Cons:
Bloody Expensive
Can get bigger consumer drives for less.

I hope this helps. :)

[Tehben Dean]

Hi Daniel,
How good is the new Macbook Pro quad core i7 processor with 17 inch screen for video editing? I am seriously considering it due to the constant travel, so a mac pro will be sitting idle. Perhaps I can get the 4GB ram of the mac book pro to 8 gb.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi

I actually just did a test yesterday comparing a 2008 3GHz 2x quad core (8core) MacPro w/10GBram and my 2011 2.3GHz quad core i7 MacbookPro w/8GBram.

Rendering graded 5D footage to ProRes 4444 1920x1080 from Davinci Resolve. (5D to avoid using my RR in the mac pro). With identical settings rendering to and from internal disk drives the MacPro spit out ProRes at 13fps and the MacbookPro at a blazing 20fps!

R3ds playback in RCXPro 1/4 Res on the Macbook no problem. I might do an R3d render from Resolve test tonight without the RR on the pro and see how that turns out.

The new MacBooks are damn fast!

[Martin Widerberg]

Thanks you Daniel!

[Daniel Macleod]

Thanks you Daniel!

Your very welcome I hope I managed to help! :)

[albert rudnicki]

Hello Daniel
I have mac pro 2010 8core / 5,1
I am using 2 video cards at the moment :gt120 and GTX 285, which was the original configuration for Resolve.
I want to replace gt120 with quadro 4000 and run gtx285 alongside.
is it possible, in spite lack of extra power connector in the mac pro?
thanks !

Albert

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Albert, it is possible, but a real pain in the ass. You will need to come up with an additional power lead. Easiest solution is to tie onto the molex in the lower optical bay, however you may have issues with that depending on if you have a device there already and how much power it consumes. You may need to add a buffering cable rather than a straight adapter cable. I tried this exact configuration in an '09 Mac Pro and couldn't get power right without using a buffering cable (hard to find off the shelf) and under peak load I would experience fall-offs or insufficient power since I was also using the power lead to that optical bay to run a 7200rpm 1TB HDD. I was leaving the two onboard PCIe power leads connected to the GTX285 and pulling additional power for the Quadro, as it only requires one.

If you want my thoughts on it, I would say spend the extra bit and replace both of your video cards with dual Quadro 4000's. Or get a PCIe expansion box and move the GTX285 out of the main tower for use as your accelerator in Resolve.

[Elsie N]

I'm looking at this; http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817821011 as a way to duplicate a 60 GB HDD on one of my laptops onto a 750 GB HDD to install in its place. Will all my apps along with the OS be duplicated. In other words, when I plug in the larger HDD will I even know the difference, except for the larger size?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm looking at this; http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817821011 as a way to duplicate a 60 GB HDD on one of my laptops onto a 750 GB HDD to install in its place. Will all my apps along with the OS be duplicated. In other words, when I plug in the larger HDD will I even know the difference, except for the larger size?

Er... Yeah, it makes a duplicate... Should do it at the block level, so everything should transfer alright. OTOH, you don't need a special duplicator to duplicate a hard drive. And if you're setting up a new system drive, why not do a fresh install of the OS and all the apps and start clean? Clean is better... 99.99% of the time.

[Elsie N]

I'm going to use the laptop with the larger drive as a download for REDstation 1.8" as it has eSATA connection. The Retriever duplicator should save me some time in not having to reload everything that's already on the old drive as I would have to do after doing a clean OS install. I agree that there are other ways to duplicate a HDD... Acronis, I think is a viable solution. I was curious if there might be some Registry problems.

The main reason for buying the Retriever is that it will do a standalone duplication of a data drive that contains offloaded footage from the onboard laptop HDD. That is, I have only one eSATA connection so will have to offload onto my larger laptop HDD, then will transfer that footage via eSATA onto a 2.5" HDD in a docking station. Then I can make a duplicate backup using the standalone Retriever.

[Maxi Claudio]

I've been looking for a solution to be used with a Windows Laptop that would allow HDMI INPUT, that could be used for instance to unsqueeze 2x anamorphic, maybe apply a LUT or just capture a still and apply some looks. But more on the budget side. Then feed the output to a larger say 32in LCD as a preview for clients. The output shouldn't be a problem, but just need a way to feed in 1080p.

Thank you.