What raid speed do you need in mb/s to play back 4k, 5k, 6k?

[Joel Arvidsson]

Is there any spreadsheet that shows what read speed you need to on your raid to play back one stream of r3d 4k, 5k and 6k on a 4k display?
And what speed do you need to play it back working in 1/2 resolution in resolve and premiere?

Have a new workstation since a couple of weeks and now I need to solve the storage better for media.

My original plan is to have the media on a windows 8 server that have 300mb/s over 4 etherports. Is 300mb/s fast enough? If not, Is usb3 to slow? then what is the better solutions?


Thanks!

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

It's less about disk speed and more about processing power. Not saying that fast disks don't help though.

 

[Joel Arvidsson]

I have dual intel xeon 2687w and 64g ram so my bet is that its my two disk raid (striped/raid0) thats to slow. I did set it up with sotware raid intead of supermicros hardware. But I think its more or less the same on a striped 2 disk raid. If I ran aja diskspeed test I got read write around 250mb/s. My guess is that with 3 striped disks I would get much better result.

 

[Ron Amborn]

Joel
The two components are equally important for this process. Please send an email to our RED workflow specialist Devon Cook at devon@maxxdigital.com and he can go over the real numbers with you and send some info. I do know the storage needs to have a sustained 1500 MB/sec to do the 4K and we have systems that can do 2000 plus. It is not an inexpensive solution but ture 4K is serious business as you well know. happy Holiday and I am around as well to help. ron@maxxdigital.com

 

[Joel Arvidsson]

Great will do that. Thanks for the advice!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

R3D is more demanding than people realize, there's more going on than just the data rate of the R3D file. The R3D system seems to read ahead and perform multiple read backs for some reason and it's consistent across all apps that support R3D as they're derived from the same SDK. I personally don't like working with R3D 5K EPIC footage off any drive system that can't sustain at least 350MB/s reads. That's plenty of speed plus overhead for one stream of 5K (and presumably 6K as well), but it's a tight fit for two streams of 5K, especially at 7:1 or lower compression ratios. You pretty much need to plan on 550-600MB/s if you want to pull from 3 streams at a time. If you want to get into playback of 4K DCP or other less-compressed formats, you need even more speed -- like Ron mentions above, you're looking at 1.5G/s in some situations. I'm assuming you're just talking about R3D footage though, so we don't need to get that crazy with it unless you want to hand have the budget. The external RAID I have connected to my Z820 can read at close to 1600MB/s and it feels like great solution with smooth performance for most everything I do on that system and I don't think I'm doing that amazing -- my projects are all corporate, government and an occasional TV commercial. OTOH, I've cut lots of projects in the past on a laptop with a decent 300MB/s (give or take) external unit. As you have probably found with your solution, it works, but you're experiencing bottlenecks. Easy enough to overcome those little hang-ups, but it costs real money.

Adding more drives into a RAID-0 stripe will boost your streaming / transfer speed. I do tend to run RAID-0 for workspace in most of my workstations, but once you get more than 4 or 5 drives in that arrangement, it starts making more sense to explore RAID-5 and RAID-6 configurations for the added fault tolerance.

 

[Joel Arvidsson]

Jeff what are you using for connection to your raid?