This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] USB3 Drives for Editing? Opinions?

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] USB3 Drives for Editing? Opinions?

I have no usb3 reservations. My reservations are mainly with doing hard editing on small cheap drives.

Benny Christensen

Producers Playhouse

On Jun 30, 2014, at 9:23 AM, "Wilson Chao wilsonchao@gmail.com [Avid-L2]" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Sorry I'm late to this thread as I've been away for a few days.

I'm surprised to read others' reservations such as "I would not do it every day, but in a pinch. . . " or "I have been able to [do limited work but]. . . anything more. . . is pushing it." These comments imply that USB 3.0 drives fail to perform as media drives for Avid editing compared to drives with other interfaces, such as FireWire, Thunderbolt, or eSATA. However, I don't see any observations about the specific limits of USB 3 drives, so I'd like to offer some of my own experiences, and ask some questions of fellow L'ers.

I have an Avid (MC7 on an HP Z800) that's been working fulltime every day for two years on a PBS long-form nonfiction series. It has 24TB of local storage dedicated to the project (plus a bunch of backup drives and an 18TB NAS connected via ethernet.) It has 4 SATA drives of 2TB each connected to the motherboard, and 4 USB 3 drives of 4TB each connected via 3rd-party USB 3 interfaces. I have lots of media on all 8 drives, a mix of everything from DNxHD 145 & 220x through Red camera originals.

I have no rules or limitations on what media types go on what drives. They all work fine, day in and day out, without any worries. BTW, all the drives are HGST-branded (formerly Hitachi) 7200rpm mechanisms. I haven't observed any differences in our ability to edit on any drives.

I also have some drives (again, HGST 7200 rpm) which I've bought raw & installed in 3rd-party cases (OWC Mercury Elite Pro) cases with both USB 3 & FireWire 800 interfaces. I've compared these drives connected via both these interfaces to the same Z800, and I can't see any difference in usability, other than that the USB 3 has higher throughput. These drives will will do about a 135 MB/sec. copy of large files. This means that a single USB 3 host adapter is reading more than 1,000 mbits/sec. and simultaneously writing more than 1,000 mbits/sec, which is way, way more than the throughput of a FireWire 800 buss with a pair of chained FW800 drives.

So yeah, I use USB 3 drives every day for Avid editing, period, with no ifs, ands or buts.

Help me out here - for those L'ers who have implied that they have reservations about USB 3 drives - what exactly have been your problems? Where have USB 3 drives failed to perform where other interfaces have succeeded?

What am I missing here?

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:34 PM, hoplist@hillmanncarr.com [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Is USB3 really a perfectly acceptable choice for video editing, or should a be making an effort to stay away. Are there issues other than raw speed that should be considered. Historically, aspects of USB bus design made highly problematic for video editing.

Does the raw speed simply make the old issues moot? Has USB3 been redesigned to support sustained, dedicated throughputs?

Cheers,
tod