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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 :)

Raid Set Up question for Pro Mac

Run the three drives in Raid 5, which stripes across the three drives and allows for any one drive to fail. When replaced the data on the other drives can rebuild the lost drive. Final usable space will be about 3 TB. This is the safest route for a 3 drive setup with no back up solution needed. Also you will see very good access speeds in a striped setup

Ron
 
You can't do that without a RAID card, the OS only offers RAID 0 or 1. One is not safe, the other one slow…
BTW, I'd suggest CalDigit over Apple's card.
 
I have Caldigit's RAID card with 4 1TB drives in a RAID 0 and I'm getting speeds of 380mb/s.

I did however discover that there are some spikes, i.e. performance hits that seem to be due to the drives, so they are being replaced. This involves moving the boot drive to the optical bay. If you are comfortable working inside your mac, then this will be an easy thing to do. I would go with Seagate or Hitachi drives.
 
For 2K, you may want to look at an 8 bay external RAID. You should aim to have read/write speeds in excess of 400mb/s. My setup should allow for editing 1080P just fine, but I might be pushing it for doing 2K DPX.
 
CalDigit RAID card is the best RAID card right now for the Mac. ...Or at least it is if you don't need full SAS connectivity. Don't buy the Apple card -- it sucks. I have an Apple RAID card for sale, but I haven't found anyone I dislike enough to actually sell it to them.

There is nothing wrong with running a RAID-0. In fact, for a 3-drive RAID configuration like this, I would recommend the RAID-0. This is how I have my Mac Pro workstations configured -- a single fast drive for OS and applications, then a 3-drive RAID-0 for workspace. To be honest, a 3-drive RAID-5 isn't all that secure and I have seen them fail before where replacing the faulty drive still could not allow for full recovery. You also lose a significant amount of space and performance by going to a RAID-5 on a 3-drive system.

If you want something a lot more secure than a RAID-5, then move to an external RAID-5 or RAID-6 with 5 or more drives. Or get the CalDigit card and do the boot drive w/ 3-drive RAID-0 internally and add another 3-drive RAID-0 externally, that is a mirror of the internal RAID.

The real consideration here is your backup solution. Have a good backup plan in place and stick to it. Then you will have no fear of your RAID-0 going down. If it does, and more than likely it will not, you can simply replace the problem drive and rebuild from your backups. I have to disagree with Ron in post #2. I would never consider a 3-drive RAID-5 to be secure enough to not have a backup solution.

With a fast 3-drive RAID-0 (3x1TB 7200rpm) you can just about grade 2K DPX sequences in real-time. Or you can on a 3GHz 8-core Mac Pro. You take about a 30% decrease in performance by going to RAID-5. But either configuration (0 or 5) will be plenty fast enough for working with R3D files, transcodes, renders, ProRes, etc..
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
CalDigit RAID card is the best RAID card right now for the Mac. ...Or at least it is if you don't need full SAS connectivity. Don't buy the Apple card -- it sucks. I have an Apple RAID card for sale, but I haven't found anyone I dislike enough to actually sell it to them.

There is nothing wrong with running a RAID-0. In fact, for a 3-drive RAID configuration like this, I would recommend the RAID-0. This is how I have my Mac Pro workstations configured -- a single fast drive for OS and applications, then a 3-drive RAID-0 for workspace. To be honest, a 3-drive RAID-5 isn't all that secure and I have seen them fail before where replacing the faulty drive still could not allow for full recovery. You also lose a significant amount of space and performance by going to a RAID-5 on a 3-drive system.

If you want something a lot more secure than a RAID-5, then move to an external RAID-5 or RAID-6 with 5 or more drives. Or get the CalDigit card and do the boot drive w/ 3-drive RAID-0 internally and add another 3-drive RAID-0 externally, that is a mirror of the internal RAID.

The real consideration here is your backup solution. Have a good backup plan in place and stick to it. Then you will have no fear of your RAID-0 going down. If it does, and more than likely it will not, you can simply replace the problem drive and rebuild from your backups. I have to disagree with Ron in post #2. I would never consider a 3-drive RAID-5 to be secure enough to not have a backup solution.

With a fast 3-drive RAID-0 (3x1TB 7200rpm) you can just about grade 2K DPX sequences in real-time. Or you can on a 3GHz 8-core Mac Pro. You take about a 30% decrease in performance by going to RAID-5. But either configuration (0 or 5) will be plenty fast enough for working with R3D files, transcodes, renders, ProRes, etc..
Click to expand...
Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised when my new drives come in. In Final Cut, I was getting the orange render bar on 1080P 10bit uncompressed with no option to switch to high quality playback. Yet my RAID seems plenty fast to play it. So, could be the drives were just bad or something else is going on. If I can do 1080P uncompressed with some room to spare, I will be a happy camper. Although, I'm sure my mac isn't. A lot of heat in there with 5 drives running. Eventually I'll put buy a big, fast external RAID. But for now, this will do.
 
1080p uncompressed 10bit is a dog if you're running it through the standard QT codec for that. I've tried it here and it chokes up the internal RAID. The external CalDigit HDPro that handles 450MB/s does better and can more than handle the data rate, but even the 3.2GHz 8-core doesn't like it. It also doesn't help that most of QT and FCP are still primarily resident on a single CPU. I actually get better performance on DPX sequences wrapped to QT with GlueTools.

You will have performance spikes and drop-outs with most any drives on a smaller RAID volume. Best way to even out performance is a larger array. But if you still see the effect with 5 drives, you may have something else going on. I would suspect power or heat issues to start with, not necessarily the drives themselves.
 
Here's the CalDigit RAID Card. It's the only one they have. And it allows for connecting external SATA systems.

http://www.CalDigit.com/RAIDCard/

Just be aware that the CalDigit card does not allow you to connect SAS drives. I'm assuming your 300GB 10Krpm is actually the 300GB SATA VelociRaptor (very nice drive) since you're already using it. And in that case, you will be just fine.

EDIT> You also don't need the RAID card now if you don't need an external RAID or RAID-5 at this time. For a simple 1+3 RAID-0 config, software RAID will work pretty well. The overhead on a RAID-0 is minimal.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
1080p uncompressed 10bit is a dog if you're running it through the standard QT codec for that. I've tried it here and it chokes up the internal RAID. The external CalDigit HDPro that handles 450MB/s does better and can more than handle the data rate, but even the 3.2GHz 8-core doesn't like it. It also doesn't help that most of QT and FCP are still primarily resident on a single CPU. I actually get better performance on DPX sequences wrapped to QT with GlueTools.

You will have performance spikes and drop-outs with most any drives on a smaller RAID volume. Best way to even out performance is a larger array. But if you still see the effect with 5 drives, you may have something else going on. I would suspect power or heat issues to start with, not necessarily the drives themselves.
Click to expand...
Should I use the AJA codecs? I've been wanting to try out gluetools. Maybe it's time to do that.
 
The AJA codecs are free, but have some limitations. However they are good to test with if you're interested in wrapping DPX sequences. Performance is similar to GlueTools. You can also download the GlueTools demo. It works for some, not for others. I like GlueTools, but I don't use it much. 97.5% of all my stuff gets churned out as ProRes HQ. But here and there I do something that needs better quality and I'll go the DPX conform via Crimson and GlueTools to finish the edit.
 
No, I have not used Cineform with this setup. In fact, I haven't really used Cineform other than an older version of their HD toolset on a couple PCs. 2~3 years ago...

I think as far as editing, you Mac Pro should be just fine. It's going to be the transcodes and rendering of footage that will be the hang-up. It won't be bad, it just won't be as fast as with the latest and greatest hardware. I think it's plenty good to start with and as things progress, you could pick up a new 8 or 16 core Mac next year and keep your current system to render along with it.

2K finish is the most logical for what you shoot with RED. Be it film out, HDCAM SR, or Blu-Ray, a 2K master is a good place to be. If you are talking that level of quality, I would definitely look into Cineform. But also look at GlueTools and what it currently brings to the table for integrating DPX sequences with FCS. I'm personally expecting Adobe to be the de-facto standard for us small guys when working with RED. I think the CS4 plug-in from RED is going to be HUGE and we should know very soon.
 
I really don't know the answer to that question, as I have not used CineForm recently and not at all on OSX. That may just be a question for the guys at Cineform. See what kind of drive performance they say you will need.

For what it's worth, 1TB 7200rpm 32MB HDD's have become quite cheap. I see no reason to not set up a 3-drive RAID-0 in the system and then expand from there with an external box if needed. I would like to think such an internal RAID would handle Cineform @ 2K.
 
Thanks Jeff and Steve for many useful informations!
 
RayFrisby said:
Just one last question Jeff, do you think I would be better investing in an external raid or do you think the internal 3 Disc setup would be sufficient for 2K work with Cineform ?
Click to expand...

That will work well. CineForm 4:4:4 encodes at 2K from Red sources are typically under 40MB/s, well within the capacity of 3 drive RAID 0 (even 2 a disk RAID.) We still recommend a three drive RAID for any 4K 4:4:4 work which can be 80MB/s.
 
RayFrisby said:
Hi I was wondering if anybody can help

I have a medium/large sized project coming up and was thinking of re equipping my pro mac for it. (2.66ghz dual dual with 8gb Ram)
If not I will look at using external storage via fiber channel or raid arrays.

Regards
Click to expand...

At 2K the data rate is not a problem. We test on a 2.66GHz dual dual with 4gb RAM and a 2 disk RAID 0. When FCP plays a sequence, it does a seek, read, decode, and then display sequentially for each frame. The latest CineForm Codec can render 4:4:4 high detail HD material at about 40 fps on our setup, running through the FCP pipeline slows that down a bit. Because of FCP sequential processes each frame, it is very sensitive to both the data rate and the seek time. Fiber Channel is a firehose for the data, and if FCP read 2-3 frames at a time, it would be fine. Unfortunately the seek time is longer than the combined seek/read time for a 2 disk RAID 0 with 2K source.
 
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