Anson Fogel
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2008
- Messages
- 537
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- Age
- 53
- Location
- Salt Lake City
- Website
- www.camp4collective.com
All,
As our little shop gets busier, we find we need more and more to share fast raid storage between machines, and to move that storage in and out of the field and to other shops. We are a red heavy, mac centric shop doing a lot of different kinds of shoots, and are now using different machines to perform editing, rendering, grading and audio post. In another thread I discussed fast shared options, and sneakernet still wins. We are grading in Color and DaVinci, editing in FCP and AVID, graphics in AE and audio post in ProTools, with rockets in 2 machines (edit/render and grade/render). We're looking to relegate our proprietary heavy CalDigit and MAXX Raids to nearline/offline storage, and move to using portable RAID boxes where 2 exist for each project and are shuttled around (1 is for nightly mirror backup).
Question A: Is 150 or 230+ MBps fast enough for moderate online 1080P and RED native workflows in DaVinci, Color, FCP, RCX, Storm, CS5?
Question B: What units here do people have experience with? As we see it, the best current "mainstream" OTS options are:
Gtech GSpeed eS Pro. GOOD: fast (no spec, but looks like 300MB+) in raid 5, up to 8TB, well reputed (Cioni mentions using these on spidey) BAD: loud (?), big, no display on unit, proprietary RAID card means all machines would need new cards, locked into this standard, no room in machines for both this and generic eSATA cards means no OTHER eSATA storage.
Gtech GSpeed Q: GOOD: internal raid controller means generic eSATA, a very good thing, well reputed, raid 5 onboard, cost BAD: big, Only 200+ MBps and not clear how fast in RAID 5, no display on the unit.
CalDigit VR: GOOD: generic eSATA means works with all our machines and cards, does not lock us in, quiet, on unit display, internal raid 5, small, configure on unit BAD: Only 2 drives so up to 4TB, Cost, 140+ MBps in RAID 5, CalDigit experiences variable for me
MAXX Evo VR: GOOD: onboard RAID 5 with generic eSATA means same good things as above, benchmarks 230+MBps in RAID5, cheap, on board display and config BAD: Loud (?), have heard nothing about unit from users, seems to cheap to be true, still may not be fast enough to really be the primary working arrays
Thoughts? Man, it would be BADASS if the generic eSATA boxes with onboard RAID were getting good and fast enough to use as the primary working online storage for most work.
As our little shop gets busier, we find we need more and more to share fast raid storage between machines, and to move that storage in and out of the field and to other shops. We are a red heavy, mac centric shop doing a lot of different kinds of shoots, and are now using different machines to perform editing, rendering, grading and audio post. In another thread I discussed fast shared options, and sneakernet still wins. We are grading in Color and DaVinci, editing in FCP and AVID, graphics in AE and audio post in ProTools, with rockets in 2 machines (edit/render and grade/render). We're looking to relegate our proprietary heavy CalDigit and MAXX Raids to nearline/offline storage, and move to using portable RAID boxes where 2 exist for each project and are shuttled around (1 is for nightly mirror backup).
Question A: Is 150 or 230+ MBps fast enough for moderate online 1080P and RED native workflows in DaVinci, Color, FCP, RCX, Storm, CS5?
Question B: What units here do people have experience with? As we see it, the best current "mainstream" OTS options are:
Gtech GSpeed eS Pro. GOOD: fast (no spec, but looks like 300MB+) in raid 5, up to 8TB, well reputed (Cioni mentions using these on spidey) BAD: loud (?), big, no display on unit, proprietary RAID card means all machines would need new cards, locked into this standard, no room in machines for both this and generic eSATA cards means no OTHER eSATA storage.
Gtech GSpeed Q: GOOD: internal raid controller means generic eSATA, a very good thing, well reputed, raid 5 onboard, cost BAD: big, Only 200+ MBps and not clear how fast in RAID 5, no display on the unit.
CalDigit VR: GOOD: generic eSATA means works with all our machines and cards, does not lock us in, quiet, on unit display, internal raid 5, small, configure on unit BAD: Only 2 drives so up to 4TB, Cost, 140+ MBps in RAID 5, CalDigit experiences variable for me
MAXX Evo VR: GOOD: onboard RAID 5 with generic eSATA means same good things as above, benchmarks 230+MBps in RAID5, cheap, on board display and config BAD: Loud (?), have heard nothing about unit from users, seems to cheap to be true, still may not be fast enough to really be the primary working arrays
Thoughts? Man, it would be BADASS if the generic eSATA boxes with onboard RAID were getting good and fast enough to use as the primary working online storage for most work.
