External Hard drive(RAID) questions

[Jony Karlsson]

Hey,

I have new Mac Pro(2013). I´m editing red epic footage, mainly 5k. How fast external hard drive do I need for editing that footage flawlessly? Does the speed of the hard drive become a bottle neck of the system at some point?

Can you recommend some fast enough hard drives (raid configurations) for Red 5K editing?

Thanks,

 

[Eric Bowen]

A raid 0 is fast enough for 5K R3D's. A single SSD drive is better. Beyond that any raid requirements are based on volume capacity and redundancy requirements ie realtime data protection.

 

[Jony Karlsson]

Thanks for reply.

Does anyone have any idea how much software-made raid configuration affects processor performance? How big piece does it cut off from the whole capasity? Cause in new mac pro you can´t use hardware-made raid, am I right? Or does some external raidboxes have hardware raid-cards inside them?

 

[Eric Bowen]

The Cineraid Thunderbolt 2 boxes have the Areca SAS controllers in them. That would not be a software raid. Normally software raid eats 5 to 15% of the CPU depending on the raid and CPU. Figure in that area though on average.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

As a basic and overly simplified comparison and explanation, current eSATA and USB3 use x1 pci-e lane gen3 which is aprox. up to 500 MB/s, additionally SATA drives have a single I/O path, so the drive can read or write but not both simultaneously, effectively cutting your speed in half. The bottleneck is usually the drive itself, most consumer drives only operate at around 100 MB/s, with higher end drives operating at 200 MB/s. But there is still only a single I/O path, so the drive cannot simultaneously read and write, it has to alternate during heavy read/write workloads and effectively runs at half speed for sustained activities. SAS drives overcome that limitation and can read/write at the same time. And Raids combine the I/O and speeds of all the drives.

So your most effective combo is a Raid-0 with two drives or Raid-5 with 4+ drives. SAS drives are only required if you need to multi-task extensively or you're utilizing a server situation where multiple systems or users access the same data or material.

Data rates vary by compression and aspect ratios, these are broad general estimates
4k R3D is aprox 40 MB/s
5k R3D is aprox 60 MB/s
6k R3D is aprox 90 MB/s

 

[Jony Karlsson]

Thanks guys for replys.

Shiblom, would you recommend to get for example raid 0 configurated external harddrive for "editing" Hard drive and maybe a normal hard drive as a "export" drive. That way avoiding a situtation where drive has to read and write at the same time. Atleast during exports. Is there a situation during normal editing situation where drive has to write at the same time when reading the files from drive?