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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

RED Station transfer speeds

Tony Lorentzen

Tony Lorentzen

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Hi all,

Just wondering what kind of transfer speeds people are getting off of their RED Stations with the new SSDs and what the theoretical max. speed is from the SSDs?

Tony
 
Theoretical max speed of the RED SSDs is 3Gbps [286MB/s], since they use a 3Gbps SATA interface. In reality, they're quite fast for reads, I can get over 250MB/s reads on my bigger workstations, connected to good eSATA host. I've had it peak around 280MB/s in some situations. Writes are obviously slower, but in most situations you won't have a need to write to them, other than to copy new firmware for the camera, which happens in the blink of an eye. A completely full 256GB SSD can be unloaded in less than 20 minutes on a capable system.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Theoretical max speed of the RED SSDs is 3Gbps [286MB/s], since they use a 3Gbps SATA interface. In reality, they're quite fast for reads, I can get over 250MB/s reads on my bigger workstations, connected to good eSATA host. I've had it peak around 280MB/s in some situations. Writes are obviously slower, but in most situations you won't have a need to write to them, other than to copy new firmware for the camera, which happens in the blink of an eye. A completely full 256GB SSD can be unloaded in less than 20 minutes on a capable system.
Click to expand...

if using a mac pro tower - how would you recommend the setup?
 
we were clocking 270 mb with the atto and a fanout cable...and the box has 8gb ram and about 1 million permission issues yet to be cleaned out. Imagine a permissions free and 32gb ram box and a second atto (if possible) . 2 epic show and we never got caught without a reload and our amazing Dit Jaime was trancoding simultaneously...
 
ATTO H680 is my controller card of choice for both eSATA and non-RAID SAS. I use the HighPoint mini-SAS to eSATA fan-out cable. It's not Rocket science. Use a good SAS/SATA host controller and you'll be fine. Like I said, ATTO H680 is my favorite -- it has two mini-SAS external ports, each carry 4 x 6Gbps SATA/SAS channels. They also have a H6F0 model that has 4 external mini-SAS for 16 total SATA/SAS ports.

Just did a speed test with a 128GB SSD and it looks like about 268MB/s. Not totally scientific, I used the stopwatch on my iPhone. ;) That was on a 2009 Mac Pro w/16GB RAM, ATTO H680 card connecting the RED STATION with a HighPoint cable. Copying to internal RAID-0 of 4x2TB HDD's.
 
Sweet - great info, Jeff. Thanks a lot :-)
 
Apologies for being a bit off topic but it's my understanding that the atto h380 and h680 with a fan out cable don't work with all drives and chip sets. Jeff or anyone, can you report your results? I have an H380 with fan out but I've found that some drives won't mount off it but will off my 4-port dat optic.
 
I haven't had any problems since I installed my H680. Everything I've connected has just plain worked. That said, I'm a DP not a DIT, so I don't get bombarded with the constant stream of different vendor drives they to. BUt for what I have (Seagate, Wester Digital, Maxtor, RedStation, GTechnology), its all groovy.
 
just got my h680 in, has anybody drived hardware configured raids with it? my OWC 4 bay raid 5, and a OWC raid 1 won't mount at all with the high point fan out. singe disk drives mount great, and the fw800 mounts fine with the raided drives.
 
Hey Jeff - complete newbie re: Red station/SSD. Have Mac Pro 12core - can you give me some sense of diff in speed of using your suggested ATTO H680 vs the stock ports on the Tower? Just trying to understand how much speed I might gain for the $400 investment.

cheers
Stu Aull
Alaska
 
To address a couple points brought up in this thread, apparently there are some more compatibility issues between the ATTO controllers and various SATA devices that I had realized. I personally have not encountered any with my hardware. But it's making me pause in any future referrals of this hardware to others, or at least not without issuing a statement that one should research or test first. Most of the support techs at ATTO take a very curious position and state, "we don't support eSATA" when you contact them. Which is totally stupid because SATA, and therefore eSATA, are both subsets of the SAS specification. They market their SAS/SATA host adapters as being just that -- SAS and SATA. A quick look through the change history for driver and firmware updates shows that most of those updates are often done in whole or in part to better support certain eSATA devices, port multipliers or expanders. ...But, I digress.

stu aull said:
Hey Jeff - complete newbie re: Red station/SSD. Have Mac Pro 12core - can you give me some sense of diff in speed of using your suggested ATTO H680 vs the stock ports on the Tower? Just trying to understand how much speed I might gain for the $400 investment.
Click to expand...

The external ports on the current model Mac Pro are all FireWire 800 and USB2.0. FireWire 800 being the faster of the two at 800 Megabits/second. The ports on the current SAS/SATA cards like the ATTO H680 are either 3Gbps or 6Gbps, depending on which model of card and which standard they adhere to. The mini-SAS ports used on these "bigger" adapter cards have 4 channels (or ports) each inside them, each channel at the appropriate 3 or 6 Gbps. As a general speed comparison, 3Gbps is equal to 3000Mbps, or 3.75X faster than FireWire 800. And 6Gbps SATA is twice as fast as that.

Keep in mind they are all interface speeds and the upper limits of what can be handled. Actual speeds depend on the capabilities of your storage devices.
 
Chris McKechnie said:
What about the Esata to thunderbolt card reader? Thinking about picking up the one from Sonnet.
Click to expand...

I'm thinking about ordering one.... But I have mixed feelings on it. I feel that Sonnet really missed the boat when it comes to the potential of this product. It has three major shortcomings:

1> Does not support ExpressCard 2.0.
2> Only a single slot.
3> No ThunderBolt Pass-Thru port.

Once it's connected to the system, it gives you an ExpressCard-34, 2.5Gbps slot. You can then insert your desired ExpressCard adapter. So, handy for adding a second ExpressCard to a 17" MBP or adding a slot where one doesn't exist to the iMac or 15" MBP.

I have a hunch that this product will fade into obscurity once the Thunderbolt to eSATA and USB3.0 adapters hit the market. And that could be a big reason why it seems they didn't try to produce something great here.
 
Thanks for info Jeff - understand your hesitation about referrals. If you include the caveats I think you are covered. These kind of hardware discussions are what make this site Smoke!

Stu Aull
Alaska
 
The biggest WTF issue with the Sonnet Expresscard TB adapter is that it doesn't support SxS cards. Sonnet (ofcourse) blames Sony.
 
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