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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 :)

6TB Solid State storage using SSD

Dan Hudgins

Dan Hudgins

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A "contact" of mine who has an Andromeda RAW camcorder sent me a link to some information about someone who seems to have set up 6TB of solid state storage using SSD units!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22

It seems my "contact" was looking for information on how to RAID SD cards since I told him I am doing tests with using FLASH USB and SD drives to get more MB/sec so I can use higher resolutions for the PIX playback frames with my editing system, SATA harddrives glitch quite a bit. On my Brothers computer using a 4GB SD card over the USB we were able to get good playback "without" dropped frames full screen at 800x600 which should be 1K wide for 2.4:1 windowed frames, but that needs more testing. With something faster than an SD card over USB it may be possable to get 1280x720p uncompressed playback from my system, but I need to work out some kind of RAID 0 solid state storage for his system to test that option.

Anyway, I thought this might be of some interest for RED ONE users looking to increase render time throughput etc... (is it on the level?)

Here is another link about what this guy seems to have done to get 6TB!?,

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/836i6/hey_reddit_samsung_gave_me_24_new_ssd_drives_to/
 
http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1100

I mocked up once what it would take to build a little CF Card Raid Array.

Pretty simple. With the new SSD Cards it's even easier since a Solid State HDD is really just a little CF Card RAID.
 
Drive max glitch free read speed?

Drive max glitch free read speed?

Gavin Greenwalt said:
I mocked up once what it would take to build a little CF Card Raid Array.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. For my system it looks like it would be good to have like 2.1TB of solid state disk in the system all the time for the PIX frames, a few 2.1TB hard drives for key frames and audio frames, and then many more TB of harddrives for camera, work, and output files on removable drives, maybe hot swap.

One can get by with much less, but it would be cool to see everything working at the full potential...

I wonder what MB/sec people are getting in the real world on their SATA harddrives, my EIDE drives only seem to work up to about 2MB/sec read for frames at 24fps, and my Brother's 3.4GHz system with SATA does not seem much better with the harddrives, but the USB stick drive seems to get up to about 20MB/sec, so how do you get the SATA harddrives to not glitch on reads under XP Home SP3?
 
LOL at the 6TB SSD RAID... Wonder what the actual lifespan is on that thing? About a week? And I'm under the impression they spent someone else's money to build it.

Anyway, it's a glimpse of things to come. In a few more years, mechanical HDDs will reach extinction and we'll be buying 6TB SSD drives at Wal-Mart that sustain 2GB/sec in a single unit. It's coming...
 
MLC SSDs have a very finite number of cycles on their memory "cells" and this number of cycles deteriorates faster with more frequent use, so it's hard to put an exact number on them. Cycle counts are increased dramatically if they're incorporated into a RAID system. They should have used SLC type SSD's instead. But that would have meant cutting the speed and capacity by quite a bit. There's a reason the RED RAM has 2x64GB SSDs inside for $4500. The thing needs to last through a guaranteed number of cycles.

I was kinda joking when I said "a week", but under real-world, every day use, I don't see that drive array lasting more than a few months. With MLC SSD media there are certain operations you do not want to do, according to the manufacturers (including Samsung).

DO NOT: Combine in a data stripe or parity array (RAID 0, 5, 6), Defrag, low-level format, full format or zero out data unless you intend to destroy the unit.

Just the current limitations of the technology. But it would sure be fun to build and play with something like that 24-drive array. Having about $10K worth of SSD's has to be fun, right? :)
 
Ah, I see. Well either way, it's fricken sweet! Exciting that one day we could be working on drives like that...
 
WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many)

WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many)

In my case the SSD would be used for storing the PIX frames for playback. I am adding both color in 15,16,24,and 32 bpp and monochrome in 8bpp with resolutions windowed in screen sizes from 320x200 up to 1920x1440 (2048x1536 is supported but there are few if any video boards that work banked at that resolution).

Tests so far show that 800x600x2 (16bpp) works from a SD card through USB, so thats about 960128 bytes per frame. In monochrome windowed 1500x638x1 (for 2.40:1) would be 957128 bytes per frame so that should maybe also work. With a faster drive 1600x900x1 might work. 1280x720x2 is 188433128 per frame or at 24fps about 45MB/sec so color "HD" uncompressed playback might work, but I would need to test that.

Not all video boards support 24bpp mode which would playback better than the more common 24bpp in 32bpp video modes. 32bpp uses a lot of disk space for the PIX files and slows the loading, so 24bpp may work better if you want the best color playback.

As for the memory going bad, I think that is mostly if you write many times, in my case it would be WORM drive ((Write-Once, Read-Many) for the most part, you would just change the PIX frames about once for each film project, they are parked on the SSD for random access playback in my NLE. For that WORM use they should last years, would they not?
 
Yeah, but we don't know MTBF numbers or price... Press release looks good, I'm thinking it will be expensive. SSD tech is evolving very fast though. It won't be very long before lifespan is a non-issue and prices fall through the floor, eventually becoming cheaper than mechanical hard drives due to low manufacturing costs and fewer materials used.
 
Yeah. I really like the idea of memory getting hooked onto the transistor train. Spinny, whirly things simply can't evolve as quickly. Now that storage performance is attaching itself to moore's law we should see some pretty awesome options in the not too distant future.
 
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