Hi Wilson,
I had seen those boxes but didn't know if the brand was good or not; it's great to see they have the Chao Seal of Approval!
Probably should have guessed Wilson would be the one with the needed info about all things drives. It must be 20 years ago now when you and I were messing around with some kind of adapters that were on the market here -- I think they converted IDE drives to SCSI or something. Can't clearly remember! Good Lord, we've been at this too long.
Cheers,
Tim
Tim,
I've had great success with RAID enclosures from Akitio:
In 2014 I managed the post for a 3-hour performance series for PBS prime time, for which I ran 3 Avid MC rooms in parallel, each with locally-attached storage. We were cutting multicam sequences of dance performances, shot w. 6 iso'd feeds, with long takes (rolling for 5 hours straight). So to edit, we had to roll 6 streams (1080i at DNxHD 145, 300GB each) in sync. I ended up using a pair of RAID boxes for each Avid, with each box handling 3 streams. Each box was (an earlier version of) this:
Each box had a pair of 7200rpm SATA drives, running RAID 0 through the enclosure's internal controller. My measurements of read speed from each box were consistently above 100MB/sec. (800 mbits/sec.) even on the inner cylinders (i.e. when the drives were 90% full). More importantly, the seek times with 3 streams of video and 24 streams of audio were sufficient to avoid any dropped frames, ever.
I bought 8 of those Akitio RAID enclosures, for about $70 each back in 2014. Put a pair of Toshiba 2TB SATA drives in each box; cost me ~$70 each back then. So each Avid had 8TB of RAID 0 storage at a cost of about $400 total. They all ran perfectly for the duration of the edit, and those boxes have been running ever since w. no problems. I've since bought 2 more, so I now have 10 of these enclosures, of slightly different variants (some USB 3, some USB 3.1, some with eSATA ports too).
A couple of notes:
1) I also bought some 4-bay enclosures. but my tests showed a steeply diminishing return when moving from a pair of drives at RAID 0, up to 3 drives, and then to 4 drives. I saw much better bandwidth from a pair of RAID 0 boxes, each with 2 drives, than from a single RAID 0 box with 4 drives. Also, I'm not entirely comfortable with the lack of redundancy of RAID 0, so it scares me to risk losing everything in a quad-bay box if 1 drive goes south!
2) I'm sure you know this, but at the risk of being obvious, buy reliable drives! I'm partial to Toshiba and HGST/WD drives, both of which are heirs to the the fabled Hitachi designs of yore.
3) I don't know if you can manage this, but if you can capture your original footage (in realtime, from the cameras) onto your drives, and then edit from those files as they were laid down, you'll be WAY ahead of the game. When you copy those files, each file on the target drive will be contiguous, which means the seek times during multicam playback will be far, far worse. I know this isn't always possible, but it's worth doing when you can.
Good luck, and let us know how things work out for you!
Cheers,Wilson Chao from Boston
On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 1:41 AM Tim Selander selander@tkf.att.ne.jp [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
To the Avid-L braintrust!
We're looking to replace a failing MacPro silver tower with an iMac.
Nothing bigger than HD; three or four video tracks, max. Need a 4 bay
Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 drive case for the media raid. Any thoughts on
who makes the most reliable units? I'll take reliability over cost....
Thanks,
Tim Selander
Tokyo, Japan
Posted by: Tim Selander <selander@tkf.att.ne.jp>
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