MAC vs. PC

[Les C.]

So first thing is first, no matter if you have a Mac or PC, you have to have a RAID if your going to get any kind of decent performance in your editing. It's funny that I didn't realize that... Well it's a good thing that I ordered multiple RAID's over the last month and they are all arriving this week and next week. I should have ordered them months ago, years ago...

Be sure you have the right drives for the RAID.

You should use Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS 2TB.

The reason is that they do not attempt to heroically recover data from a bad sector, they will just mark it as bad. This is what you want from a RAID drive, but what you DON'T want from a desktop non-RAID drive. They are specifically designed for RAID.

Otherwise, you can get delays which will really annoy you - as the current drives have all kinds of errors and will do a lot of retries for weak sectors - resulting in jerky video.

Another concern is that if you run RAID 5, if one fails (and you do have a hot spare in place), it takes a while to rebuild, and if another fails, you've just lost your RAID array.

There are higher levels of RAID that offer 2 drive redundancy - or you can use relatively small TB drives which rebuilt in a reasonable time frame.

 

[Jon Jones]

Well I'm not sure which drives are in the Maxx Digital 6G 16 bay 32TB Rackmount RAID, but that is what should be here Monday for my DIT cart. Otherwise for my mini DIT station that I am keeping, I just got 2 8TB G RAID's with Thunderbolt, and they should do the trick for at least on set high speed offloads.... Well at least that is the goal.

 

[Jaakko Rinne]

+1 to everything Les said about RAID.

 

[Les C.]

Well I'm not sure which drives are in the Maxx Digital 6G 16 bay 32TB Rackmount RAID, but that is what should be here Monday for my DIT cart. Otherwise for my mini DIT station that I am keeping, I just got 2 8TB G RAID's with Thunderbolt, and they should do the trick for at least on set high speed offloads.... Well at least that is the goal.

You might ask them. It's not that other drives won't work, I've used Hitachi's in some RAIDS that were just for storing data.

But the RE4 drives will give you the best throughput without having spurious delays caused by error correction.

These large hard drives are packing so much data in such a small amount of space, they get a lot of errors anyway (that are recovered without you noticing).

And if a sector is marginal ....

If you want to get really anal, you could pull the drives out and attach each to SATA connectors on PC (yes, I know you have a Mac), and run SpinRite - which turns off error correction and exhaustively tests (recovers and maps out bad sectors).

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

You'll probably be find with whatever you get, but ... error correction of marginal sectors is one cause of pauses - and for a desktop box, where there is no raid, these drives will just try and try - for a very long time, as the manufacturers just hate to pay for shipping the defective products back when the customer gets bad sectors.

 

[Les C.]

As we're talking about RAID (and this applies to both PC and Mac), I will mention one other thing.

If your power supply dies (and power supplies do tend to die, all that high voltage and heat), you've just pulled the plug on the array.

Some drives that were writing may have succeeded, some may not have.

There's a cache in each drive.

I've been using 3ware (now owned by LSI) as they have an optional small device BBU (battery back up) with a battery that in addition to supplying power to the cache on the RAID card, deals with this caches on the drives themselves (making sure the data was written, and not just written out to the drives cache before the power went bye bye) which can cause issues.

I've never had a problem, which is why I tend to stick with 3ware/LSI. You can get a knowledgeable person on the line with an 800 call, even for products that are legacy.

And one other comment on the RE4 drives. They are enterprise 24/7 5 year drives. If you run RAID 5, you really don't want to have 2 drives fail. Check on NewEgg for issues (of course, some poor souls try to use them in non-RAID desktops and get very upset as they are designed to error out the marginal sectors).

 

[Jon Jones]

You seem to know quite a bit about RAID.... Sounds like you have been down the road a few times when it comes to drive failures and such...

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

My system is not bung, I actually decided the other day that I am going to give that MAC PRO away, along with the DIT cart it is on and a new 32TB raid array that hasn't arrived just yet. I now use the new MacBook Pro with 2 8TB Thunderbolt RAID array's, it's my new ultra portable DIT system. I have been arguing, and sticking up for it, because I spent so much on it. But I have moved on to smaller and better things. Also the one and only problem with that computer is no RAID. You guys all talking about how my system is messed up or bunged or whatever you want to call it, are wrong. The only problem is the transfer speeds.

Those transfer speeds are indeed an important thing. That said, if you're giving away a 32TB RAID, I'll take it.

Be sure you have the right drives for the RAID.

You should use Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS 2TB.

These are my top recommendation as well. They're expensive, but still cheaper (usually) than the Hitachi UltraStar models and they tend to perform a bit better. These have been 99.5% reliable in our datacenter RAID installations and I'm not pulling that figure out of thin air. I have literally bought 200 of them for that use in approximately 18 months, yes 200 of them on the nose. And I have only had one fail. Actually, it was more like DOA because it didn't even make it 24 hours before the motor seized up. In addition to that, I have been running them in other RAID units -- internal RAID-0 in Mac Pro towers, etc..

The reason is that they do not attempt to heroically recover data from a bad sector, they will just mark it as bad. This is what you want from a RAID drive, but what you DON'T want from a desktop non-RAID drive. They are specifically designed for RAID.

They also have lower transaction time-out settings and a few other features related to cache priority and other things that make them far better suited to RAID use. That is what they're optimized for. I'll choose these over the Seagate Barracuda and Hitachi UltraStar any day of the week.

 

[Jon Jones]

Lol, well im attaching it to the DIT cart that I got from Bigfoot carts, and giving it to my church.

Those transfer speeds are indeed an important thing. That said, if you're giving away a 32TB RAID, I'll take it.

 

[Les C.]

This is indeed true -- SandForce controllers are some of the worst offenders. Not in their performance, but in the advertised speeds and marketing behind them. That said, I still stand by what I said in regards to the SSD and the speeds I quoted are pretty much on par with what you can expect from the latest batch of units on the market. Intel's upcoming 720 series of SSDs is also up there in performance too, but also in price. The OCZ Vertex 4 is the current king of the hill in 2.5" SSD's. Over 90K IOPS and it can still hold over 365MB/s for read and write on incompressible data. Samsung, Intel, Crucial and now OCZ all have done away with using SandForce controllers in their newer products. Samsung and Intel develop their own -- Intel 710 has an Intel controller, as does the upcoming 720 6Gbps units. The Intel 520, 310 and 320 series all use SandForce controllers. Crucial/ Micron have their own controller. OCZ bought out IndiLinx...

The whole incompressible data thing as it pertains to larger video files like R3D, H264 and similar is somewhat of a non-concern when the SSD is being used as a primary OS / system drive. You really won't be using it for workspace or to shuttle those sorts of files around. What you do want is consistent performance and a stable product, fast reads are a bonus. The newer controllers, including SandForce, are much better at cacheing and compressing data on the fly than before. Even "incompressible" data can be cached and/or compressed with other data on internal transactions.



The M4 is a great SSD. It's not very fast compared to what else is out there, read times aren't bad but the write times stink. That aside, iit's a solid and reliable product and makes a great option for a primary system volume containing OS and apps where read speed is the primary concern.

Here's another alternative, that's quite a bit faster than the M4, or OCZ, or Intel.

It's from Micron (the parent company of Crucial - and the only US RAM supplier).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4408/...roller-native-pcie-ssd-in-350700gb-capacities

Random read is 750K IOPS (most of the Sandforce I've seen quote 75K, so this is a 10 fold improvement).
Random write is 341K IOPS (the Sandforce generally claim a max of 75K of compressed data, so a 5 fold improvement in write speed).

The PCIe interface is the future for flash.

BTW - I read about this in an Electronic Design magazine I subscribe to.

At the end of the article (mostly on Cloud), it gets into Flash.
http://electronicdesign.com/article/embedded/clouds-infrastructure-silver-lining-74014

and mentions the differences between SLC, MLC, TLC. The denser you go, the less writes before it fails.

From another article, flash also differs in how many reserved blocks a device has for when bad sectors must be mapped out.

I'm very curious about RED's flash - with it's astounding 90 day, completely worry free warranty.

What are the internal specifications for RED's flash?

 

[Rob Ruffo]

The stats on my new MAC PRO, are double of everything you have posted here, and I have a ROCKET and I don't get smooth 5k 1/2 res. playback on a full timeline. 1/8 res, yes maybe, if I'm not running anything else, and if the timeline isn't a mile long. If you get smooth 5k at 1/2 res without a rocket, either there is only 1 clip on your timeline or you pre render. Otherwise it's not true.

I get 1/4 res 100% smooth on a 2008 8 core and 4 core without issue on 90 minute timelines. Not sure what you are doing wrong. Likely your drives are crappy or are connected via USB.