Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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 :)

USB 3.0 support for upcoming REDstations ?

yes! Thunderbolt please, asap!
 
Thunderbolt, sooner the better. Agree with keeping eSATA. If its not too costly I would offer good old fashioned USB2 for compatibility.

Note to companies like Promise looking to sell Thunderbolt peripherals: include a second Thunderbolt port for daisy chaining, put a couple eSATA ports on there too so it can art as a hub and for crying out loud make it a viable portable device. GTech/Hitachi are you out there?

Cheers - #19
 
Traveling and have crap connectivity, but per Jeff's experience, e-sata can already outstrip current offload speeds from the SSD's. Thus this isn't a super pressing need until faster SSD media is available.

When that happens we might as well future proof as much as possible.

I'm cross platform, more Mac than pc. Thunderbolt that includes bus power , and USB 3 as a nice option.

Steve
 
Stephen Lovett said:
Traveling and have crap connectivity, but per Jeff's experience, e-sata can already outstrip current offload speeds from the SSD's. Thus this isn't a super pressing need until faster SSD media is available.
Click to expand...

It seems to me a huge benefit of Thunderbolt is the daisy chaining. Even though there is no drive fast enough to utilize Thunderbolt's full speed, being able to hook up the drive you are offloading from with the two drives you are backing up to all daisy chained seems hugely convenient.

I admittedly don't know all of the details on Thunderbolt so I could be completely wrong...
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
Thunderbolt, sooner the better. Agree with keeping eSATA. If its not too costly I would offer good old fashioned USB2 for compatibility.

Note to companies like Promise looking to sell Thunderbolt peripherals: include a second Thunderbolt port for daisy chaining, put a couple eSATA ports on there too so it can art as a hub and for crying out loud make it a viable portable device. GTech/Hitachi are you out there?

Cheers - #19
Click to expand...

+1 !!!
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
For anyone getting more than 150MB/sec off the Red Station - what eSATA HBA are you using?

Cheers - #19
Click to expand...

ATTO H680 and H6F0 host adapters. Make sure your host adapter drivers and firmware are up to date. I'm using the HighPoint mini-SAS to eSATA fan-out cable.

Justin O'Neill said:
It seems to me a huge benefit of Thunderbolt is the daisy chaining. Even though there is no drive fast enough to utilize Thunderbolt's full speed, being able to hook up the drive you are offloading from with the two drives you are backing up to all daisy chained seems hugely convenient.

I admittedly don't know all of the details on Thunderbolt so I could be completely wrong...
Click to expand...

Firewire can daisy-chain as well. USB uses hubs. Current Thunderbolt ports have two 10Gbps bi-directional channels for 20Gbps aggregate bandwidth in both directions. That is roughly the equivalent of a single PCIe v2.0 X4 slot. There are fast HDDs or RAID systems that can use all that speed. But being practical, it's not needed most of the time. And if it is, you probably already have a competent SAS/SATA RAID attached that is doing it. A RED Rocket at full bandwidth will saturate a Thunderbolt port. Thunderbolt is fast, but it's not super killer fast... Real-world speeds should be close to 5X the speed of USB3 with much lower latency, when both channels are used. The mini-displayport connector actually has room for two more TB channels and Intel has said that future revisions will include more channels in one port.

Once the floodgate of Thunderbolt peripherals opens, people are going to wish that they had two TB ports on their Macbook Pro systems. Daisy chaining or not.

One TB port with daisy-chained storage and RED Station module, should theoretically be able to offload a RED SSD at about 260MB+/s or max speed for the media. And should be able to copy it at that same speed, to two separate storage devices... And still have enough bandwidth left over to drive a 2560x1440 display hanging off the end of the chain. :)
 
TB and USB 3 :) mac user. USB 3 for future proofing
 
Ideal transit drive...

Ideal transit drive...

Here's the scene, familiar to many of us: making copies to client drives on/near set. Assume we have a 3G or 6G eSATA tap for the Red Station. Assume we are getting hit with tons of data and are required to make 3 copies to drives the client can walk away with and mount on their system.

What is the ideal "catch" drive in this scenario?

The 2 bay G-RAID can write at about 200MB/sec and is the best solution I know of. Unfortunately it seems they are being discontinued and some penny pinching producers balk at the price.

There are lots of single spindle options that can write at 100MB/sec over eSATA on a good day, I generally find 80MB/sec more typical. Too slow if you are managing data from 2 or more cameras, long takes, etc.

The GSpeed ES can do over 300MB/sec but they are over $800 and some systems refuse to mount them, presumably due to RAID driver issues.

For features or episodic TV, rack mountable RAID systems that can be easily removed and taken to the post facility or production company are great but overkill for short form work like music videos and TVCs.

FWIW I think the sweet spot is something similar to the G-RAID with 2 drives in RAID 0, both eSATA and Thunderbolt I/O, 200MB/sec+ write speeds (at least for the first 80% of capacity) and a street price under $300 with dual 2TB drives (4GB capacity).

Cheers - #19
 
For external HDDs that I can hand off, I roll my own with Hitachi or WD HDD's and I use Rosewill and Bytecc enclosures, typically. Half the price of G-Tech or similar units, more similar in price to the budget Maxor / Seagate ones you buy for cheap, but I typically have better reliability going this route. That's for single-drive solutions. And yeah, typical 80MB/s or so is about right. That's essentially what most current 7200rpm HDDs can sustain in most situations.

If I need faster performance, there are other options. I still tend to buy the bare enclosures where I can and integrate the drives myself as it saves a bit and only takes a few minutes to put them together. I do have some G-Tech and CalDigit units though and they have served me well. It's hard to say what is truly best. Even though they're slow, I still like the cheap, single-drive solution. I can usually make them cheap enough that I don't mind if it takes the client a while to return them. Sometimes I just expense them into the job and let them keep the drives.

I also try to avoid RAID setups for client storage. It saves headaches later with compatibility and support issues. I always supply drives, don't use drives other people give me. I've had too many issues where people give me an external drive they expect me to use and it only has a USB2 connector on it or the thing is super slow or even faulty. Nope. Don't do it.
 
Last edited:
I'd love Thunderbolt and USB 3 on a new generation of SSD mag readers.

I use Macs primarily, but very occasionally need to use Windows.

As to the rest ... I can't take the time to read the thread ... sorry.

I don't use client drives for work on set. Too damn many issues.

I use my own RAID for work whenever practical. I'm looking forward to the Pegasus Thunderbolt 6 drive enclosures ... but also to the economy priced competition that will come from companies like OWC.

I dump data to cheap drives for transport. Basically I use bare 2TB SATA drives as expensive floppy disks now. Like Jeff, I expense them into the job, letting the clients keep them.

In the short to mid term, this works and will continue to work well with any Epic data rate. F65 could choke that workflow easily, but I don't expect to work with that camera much.

In the long term, I expect SATA 6 SSD drives to become economical. ($200/TB is the "magic number" for most of my work.) I figure that will take 3-5 years.
 
Apologies to Deanan for the thread-jack.

Some of my clients can deal with bare drives but that gets me back to single spindle speeds unless they sign off on carefully labeled RAID sets which has some risk.

My primary quest is to find a cheaper but still decent alternative to the 2 drive G-RAIDs. I would prefer to have it pre-built for simplicity and to avoid being blamed for any failures.

BTW I just saw a blurb that G-Tech is showing an updated version of the G-RAIDs that has Thunderbolt and can roll dual 4TB drives to create an 8TB RAID 0 with better than 200MB/sec writes. While this will be great for a lot of projects, it will be considered overpriced overkill by an alarming percentage of the producers I work with - don't get me started ;-)

Cheers - #19
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
Apologies to Deanan for the thread-jack.

Some of my clients can deal with bare drives but that gets me back to single spindle speeds unless they sign off on carefully labeled RAID sets which has some risk.
Click to expand...

I only do that for delivery to the client ... not for working on set.

My primary quest is to find a cheaper but still decent alternative to the 2 drive G-RAIDs. I would prefer to have it pre-built for simplicity and to avoid being blamed for any failures.
Click to expand...

Good plan ...

BTW I just saw a blurb that G-Tech is showing an updated version of the G-RAIDs that has Thunderbolt and can roll dual 4TB drives to create an 8TB RAID 0 with better than 200MB/sec writes. While this will be great for a lot of projects, it will be considered overpriced overkill by an alarming percentage of the producers I work with - don't get me started ;-)
Click to expand...

I bill hourly for DIT services. This is why.

If they refuse to pay for a decent bit of hardware to get their footage delivered efficiently ... then they'll pay me to wait around on their cheapness.

With a single SATA6 drive I'll be sitting around waiting for file copies twice as long, so they'll pay for that much extra.

It adds up, and then it becomes smart for them to hire/buy an appropriate storage system. And I get to go home.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top