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tylerr
23-03-2004, 05:09 PM
I have investicated using ultra wide SCSI 15k rpm drives but has anyone tested 10K RPM SATA drives?

Richard where you testing SATA or SCSI 10K's?

Tyler

samsc
23-03-2004, 06:09 PM
I have investicated using ultra wide SCSI 15k rpm drives but has anyone tested 10K RPM SATA drives?

Richard where you testing SATA or SCSI 10K's?

Tyler

the tests are being done.

buy a couple and test them for yourself
the raptors certainly help.

or just buy one - put it into the internal slot, and dont put the os on it.

tylerr
23-03-2004, 06:12 PM
the tests are being done.

buy a couple and test them for yourself
the raptors certainly help.

or just buy one - put it into the internal slot, and dont put the os on it.

Are you talking about SATA or SCSI?

samsc
23-03-2004, 09:04 PM
Are you talking about SATA or SCSI?

buy a sata raptor drive. 10000rpm.
compare it with the existing drive. its much better.

samsc
05-04-2004, 03:21 PM
buy a sata raptor drive. 10000rpm.
compare it with the existing drive. its much better.

scsi works a little better. using 10000rpm and 15000rpm atlas iv drives, i dont see much of a performance difference with dv codecs in catalyst.

the atlas 10k iv 140gb drive has double the capacity of a single raptor.

tylerr
10-04-2004, 12:15 AM
I have just ordered per machine:

2 73GB Western Digital 10K RPM Drives
1 G5 jam
1 ATI Radion 9800 Pro
1 USB card (with internal USB's)
1 BlackMagic Decklink Extreme video input card

and a killer case that I am designing.

The scsi option was way too expensive for only a little bit of improvement. External racks an all. FYI the Glyph rack mount is only a single channel SCSI thus it prevents you from taking advantage of both channels on the ATTO UL4D card. The Storcase Data Silo does provide support for dual channel. http://www.storcase.com/DataSilo/ds320.asp

Tyler

samsc
10-04-2004, 09:37 AM
I have just ordered per machine:

2 73GB Western Digital 10K RPM Drives
1 G5 jam
1 ATI Radion 9800 Pro
1 USB card (with internal USB's)
1 BlackMagic Decklink Extreme video input card

and a killer case that I am designing.

The scsi option was way too expensive for only a little bit of improvement. External racks an all. FYI the Glyph rack mount is only a single channel SCSI thus it prevents you from taking advantage of both channels on the ATTO UL4D card. The Storcase Data Silo does provide support for dual channel. http://www.storcase.com/DataSilo/ds320.asp

Tyler
*** WARNING ****
dont do the g5 jam.
its horrible. heavy enormous.
you cant tour with it. you have to take the drives out.
its will break your computer.
SATA connectors are very very unreliable.
your computer will crash during shows because of heat issues.

just buy a single 10k scsi drive and mount it internally.
or a single raptor, and mount internally.
you DONT need to have dual channels with scsi - you arent doing uncompressed hi-def. thats the only thing you need it for.
this is not scsi bandwidth limited. And single channel of scsi is easily fast enough to do any of this.

samsc
10-04-2004, 10:31 AM
I just installed an internal 10k scsi drive in less than 10 minutes.

You dont need a dual channel card an atto ul4s will work.
http://www.attotech.com/ultra4s.html
You need to use these, and not the ul3s for g5 compatibility.

I'll do a document with pictures by the end of today showing what to do.

I have to leave it on all day to check heat....and its still winter....
but atlas IV 10k drives are not so hot - but a little more noisy than raptors.

---

to install this i used an internal round scsi cable i bought directly from adaptecs online store.

its an 'ACK-68I2-LVD-LP-Round-U320'
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/cableprodindex.html?sess=no&language=English+US&parentcat=%2fCables%2fAdaptec+Cables%2fInternal+SC SI+Cables

You can see this in the picture.
If you install this cleanly and tie up cables correctly, this is by far the best solution.
Airflow is maintained everywhere.
Im taking power from a splitter with the dvd drive.

samsc
10-04-2004, 12:07 PM
Wierd.

I just installed a new atlas IV 10k. And when i turned it on it made a horrible whine. not incredibly loud - just much louder than a normal internal drive.
Anyone - performance was shit- didnt work very well.

Swapped it out for another, and it made hardly any more noise than an internal drive. and it worked much better.

I suspect there is a maxtor problem with the loud drive.

samsc
10-04-2004, 12:44 PM
The scsi option was way too expensive for only a little bit of improvement. External racks an all.
Tyler

scsi is same price- same capacity - no dodgy g5jam:

1x10k maxtor atlas iV 146gb 700$
1x atto ul4s $350
1xadaptec cable $33

g5 jam solution ( which doesnt work...):
1x g5 jam 499$
2x raptor $500-$600


----

scsi is much much better. and you can add good quality external storage if you need more - if you use raptors you cannot do this.

Martin
10-04-2004, 01:38 PM
and a killer case that I am designing.


Do you want to share your killer casedesign? we are replacing ours.

samsc
10-04-2004, 03:21 PM
Do you want to share your killer casedesign? we are replacing ours.
if you are going to use a decklink extreme, you need a lot of space at the back, you probably need at least 10cm.

it has a big cable with all the video connectors.

its doesnt bend too easily.

definetly would not work in highend's cases. they have no room at the back.

see attachment. this is a monster cable!

with the standard decklink cards - its just bnc's mounted on the pci card

Unregistered
15-04-2004, 12:05 PM
Hi,

I´ve installed an G5 with 2xraptors (73Gb) with Apples own RAID tool,
their in RAID0, It works very very well..

mail me if you have any questions:

jan at opsethgruppen dot no


regards,

jan opseth


I have investicated using ultra wide SCSI 15k rpm drives but has anyone tested 10K RPM SATA drives?

Richard where you testing SATA or SCSI 10K's?

Tyler

samsc
15-04-2004, 02:14 PM
Hi,

I´ve installed an G5 with 2xraptors (73Gb) with Apples own RAID tool,
their in RAID0, It works very very well..

mail me if you have any questions:

jan at opsethgruppen dot no


regards,

jan opseth

works even better if you put the system on a different disc.

( it does make a difference with accuracy of playback over long segments on 4 layers - I know martin had a few issues with this in norway )

it more important in ntsc 30hz systems which have to work faster.
we only have to work at 25hz in europe - but an issue with dl1's makes them work better at 30hz too.

--

The system can interupt playback when it does house keeping or any other work - that involves disc access, or virtual memory.

Martin
15-04-2004, 04:18 PM
works even better if you put the system on a different disc.
It does make a difference with accuracy of playback over long segments on 4 layers - I know martin had a few issues with this in norway )



We tested this and found out that we did not get any more performance on a raid than on 1 std disk and 1 sata. os on one and cat on the other.
besides, when one disk fucks up, you can keep a backup on the other, so you can (hopefully) still do the show. :cool: As for the playback sync problem, the use layer function saved the day. :)

samsc
15-04-2004, 04:46 PM
We tested this and found out that we did not get any more performance on a raid than on 1 std disk and 1 sata. os on one and cat on the other.
besides, when one disk fucks up, you can keep a backup on the other, so you can (hopefully) still do the show. :cool: As for the playback sync problem, the use layer function saved the day. :)

keeping the os separate gives slightly better performance over the long term - minutes -

i dont think using an internal raid is good either. if one disc goes down - you loose everything.

there is no difference between using 1 or 2 raptors - unless you need the extra gb capacity - or unless you want to play back uncompressed movies.

samsc
15-04-2004, 05:07 PM
jan at opsethgruppen dot no

jan opseth

jan. if you dont want to register thats fine.

no email addresses on this site are visible to any search engines - or any users.
they are all hidden.

even the 'send email' function available from the members lists - is driven from a form - it does not give out or display my email address.

http://chaldee1.gotadsl.co.uk/~richardb/upload/sendmessage.php?do=mailmember&u=1

Jan Opseth
21-04-2004, 06:58 PM
We tested this and found out that we did not get any more performance on a raid than on 1 std disk and 1 sata. os on one and cat on the other.
besides, when one disk fucks up, you can keep a backup on the other, so you can (hopefully) still do the show. :cool: As for the playback sync problem, the use layer function saved the day. :)


It´s very strange you did´t see any better perf. with Raid0.. I tested this.. with and without... i did see better results with RAID

you should´t be worried the disk´s should crash.. does the OS disk fail your f...ed anyway.. If you shall be totaly backed up You should do Raid 3 or 5 external.. Better yet is SCSI 15k Cheetah´s, I have 2pc of this ones in my Windows computer in Raid 0 and I´m seeing a lot of a difference..
(vs. s-ata), so it´s a difference with RAID.

Disks rearly f... (as long as you don´t have IBM´s) What if your disk in your GrandMA or WH3 fails? THEN you are f..

Jan O..

samsc
21-04-2004, 07:05 PM
.. i did see better results with RAID
..

Which Application?

What kindof tests did you do?

Martin
21-04-2004, 11:01 PM
We tested it with the Apple people, and as you can see from the Catalyst benchmark tests, it´s not a special difference. We also tested raptors V Scsi raid at the workshop yesterday, and only on uncompressed and on 4 layers is there a noticable difference. On standard DVpal, the difference is not visible.

tylerr
22-04-2004, 06:24 AM
I assume that when you are adding a SCSI drive you are pulling the power off of the optical drive for the ATI Radeon 9800 pro and for the SCSI drive.

Tyler

samsc
22-04-2004, 06:55 AM
I assume that when you are adding a SCSI drive you are pulling the power off of the optical drive for the ATI Radeon 9800 pro and for the SCSI drive.

Tyler

yes.

---

The g5 jam came with a really poor set of power jumpers that hadnt been crimped very well.
---

in my experience - i have older macs with 4 or 5 internal drives- running power jumpers was not a problem - the psu used always seemed capable.
I often have a full set of pci cards as well.

This is not to say this will always be the case.
I tend to leave things on 24/7 the whole time - often with stuff running to soak test hardware.

Jan Opseth
22-04-2004, 03:00 PM
Which Application?

What kindof tests did you do?

I did use Xbench 1.1.3..

samsc
22-04-2004, 06:03 PM
I did use Xbench 1.1.3..
catalyst is not a datarate limited application - its a seek rate, and rotational latency limited application and io/ops/second limited

The headline datarate is not relevant.

Whats important is how fast the drive works- up to a point, and then no more.

In my testing, 2 drives was not better than one - playing back 4 movies on 4 layers at 25fps. A single drive was better.


Catalyst is not a normal application wrt disc use. Its quite different.

Spam Butterfly
25-04-2004, 06:20 PM
Tyler,

You might need to find yourself a power cable Y-splitter. I misappropriated one from some dead PC kit.

Hugh

litemover
25-04-2004, 07:38 PM
I have been using 4 Raptors in a Apple 0stripe set for 6 months now and it has worked flawless on my machine. I am able to play 720p HD compressed to half at full speed accross 3 layers (2 at full speed and 1 jumping around from 15 to 30). I am also able to play one layer of 1080p PhotoJpeg compresses to half.

I have no heat problems with my personal test setup. Unfortunately, it is a bit jury rigged but here are the details. I have 2 drives in the apple and seritek 1s2 card that connects 2 2 30" unshielded SATA Cables to 2 more drives set in their own Metal Gear cases fashioned to accept SATA input. I Chose the Metal Gear external Harddrive boxes because they are for the most part, open, allowing the drives heat sinks to do their job.

I have used other hardware such as the SATA maxi system that would crash the system running HD after only 20 min. I have also tested the system using different external cases which were fine also in an air conditioned room.

The trick is not to disturb the G5 airflow at all. By opening up a PCI slot and leaving it open, you will drastically disturb the airflow. I fashioned a PCI cover with a little wedge shaved out of it for the SATA cables to fit out of. This works well.

I hasten to add though, The Attotech UL4d and a Huge systems Dual channel U320 or any dual U320 drive system will give you data transfer up to 500mb/s, depending on how full the drives are, for over $5,000 - an investment I would consider to make for multiple High Def layers and storage. With 4 Raptors, you can get speeds over 200 mb/s for $1200.00 including cases but you will only get 288gb of data after the format and os and have to deal with SATA cables.

You can still get speeds over 200mb/s with standard 7200 rpm SATA or ata drives if they are properly striped and partitioned so that only the prime area of each disk is accessable. This is the area of each disk minus all of the inner tracks and part of the outer tracks. You can then turn these drives into 1 large SCSI drive with the right case and hardware. This is what Huge Systems, Promaxx, and a myriad of other high end storage manufacturers do. They don't use a bunch of scsi disks in those cases, they are mostly ata converted to scsi using hardware and software.

The ATTO UL4D (the scsi interface card you use to hook your mac to your SCSI drives) is suprisingly faster and better than the UL3d. Most people think that the difference is only marginal but the difference is nearly 3 times better perfomance as per my disscussions with Attotech and Huge Systems at NAB.

After seeing and evaluating all of the options, I've concluded that the best way to go, considering the fact that technology is advancing so rapidly and that there is a new technology called Xsan that will drastically change your appoach to high speed data storage, I would personally would go with the *buy the biggest and best* mentality, because with my needs, I will soon require it. If you aren't pushing the limits of the system or don't see yourself using HD in the near future, you can still benefit from Xsan and a huge fast SCSI system.

For a cheap "need it now" high speed solution, just get the raptors. They are cheap ($240) and don't require a G5Jam if you don't want one. 4 of them make a huge difference over 2, but again, if you are only running DV content which is a horribly compressed, discolored codec, then it's not worth sweating.

Each scenario has thier own requirements and pitfalls.

Christian Choi

Spam Butterfly
26-04-2004, 12:21 PM
It's a pity you couldn't have made it to the Drive Workshop in London.
We looked at all the available drive technologies and their pros and cons.

Raptors have potential but they're not quite fast enough... They're certainly a big improvement on the standard drive, but don't give the performance of a 10,000 rpm SCSI drive.

Catalyst relies on how many transactions/second a drive can perform and SCSI drives tend to beat all other comers in this department. Even RAID arraying them doesn't improve the performance for our purposes - although this is helpful for uncompressed video sources. RAID arrays increase the possible data rate and overall storage capacity not the transactions/per second - i.e. how quick the drive can physically pull the movie off the drive.

A 150 Gb 10K SCSI drive is about 400 quid (probably the same in dollars) and a SCSI card is about 200 quid. Perfect. And you can run 1 Ph-Jpeg 50% 1080P movie, two 720P movies and 4 streams of DV PAL effortlessly. DV PAL is not quite as fast as NTSC to decode...

Hugh

litemover
27-04-2004, 08:43 AM
Yes, I would have liked to come but NAB was beckoning. I agree, you cannot beat SCSI performance. The price here is coming down, the attotech UL4d is around 550 USD and a 74 gig 10k drive around 250.

Did you guys try any 8 drive arrays or an Xserve raid storage system with Fiber Channel? I'd be quite interested in how the Xserve storage system would work with Catalyst.

Best,
Christian Choi

Chris Tousey
27-04-2004, 09:05 PM
What did you need to do to get optimum speed from your UL4d? I just added a UL4d and a Atlas IV 10K and am not seeing the improvment I was expecting. It is in the 133 slot, however it did not seem to come with any special software. Is it really PnP at 133mhz?

Thanks
Chris

litemover
28-04-2004, 03:35 AM
Multiple U320 drives in a zero striped set down 2 channels. A good example would be 2 drives on one channel and the other 2 on another, or more. Use AppleRaid (disk utility) to build a 0 striped set.

With a single drive you aren't going to see much difference, at least you have the foundation to add more drives as you get them, they all must be the same capacity or they will get truncated to the lowest capacity drive.

A single drive won't do much more than a single SATA drive.

Christian

samsc
30-04-2004, 08:53 PM
What did you need to do to get optimum speed from your UL4d? I just added a UL4d and a Atlas IV 10K and am not seeing the improvment I was expecting. It is in the 133 slot, however it did not seem to come with any special software. Is it really PnP at 133mhz?

Thanks
Chris

slots dont matter.
You have to make sure its terminated + are you fitting internally or externally?

samsc
30-04-2004, 08:56 PM
Multiple U320 drives in a zero striped set down 2 channels. A good example would be 2 drives on one channel and the other 2 on another, or more. Use AppleRaid (disk utility) to build a 0 striped set.

With a single drive you aren't going to see much difference, at least you have the foundation to add more drives as you get them, they all must be the same capacity or they will get truncated to the lowest capacity drive.

A single drive won't do much more than a single SATA drive.

Christian

Having a dual drive setup makes no difference at all to everyday catalyst usage. And in several cases can be worse than a single drive.

If you are playing back dv files it wont make a sausage of a difference.
Not a thing.

You only get any improvement if you are going to be trying to playback uncompressed or near uncompressed movies.
And thats a different game - because you wont see much of a different in image quality either - all other things considered-

samsc
30-04-2004, 09:02 PM
What did you need to do to get optimum speed from your UL4d? I just added a UL4d and a Atlas IV 10K and am not seeing the improvment I was expecting. It is in the 133 slot, however it did not seem to come with any special software. Is it really PnP at 133mhz?

Thanks
Chris

what files are you testing with?
dv files?

You have to download attos drives and configuration tools, from their website. and make sure the pci card flash ram is up to date.

It doesnt make any difference to the performance of photojpeg or any other codec. it doesnt suddenly make photojpeg work. it makes dv-ntsc work on 4 layers at 30fps. thats it.
This information is all in my testing charts.

everything else is processor limited not drive limited.

litemover
24-05-2004, 02:09 AM
Having a dual drive setup makes no difference at all to everyday catalyst usage. And in several cases can be worse than a single drive.

If you are playing back dv files it wont make a sausage of a difference.
Not a thing.

You only get any improvement if you are going to be trying to playback uncompressed or near uncompressed movies.
And thats a different game - because you wont see much of a different in image quality either - all other things considered-

4 Raptors in a zero stripe array will play back blackmagic 10 bit best encoded files at full speed 30fps accross 4 layers. Just tested this on F24 6 layers.

It will play back 6 layers at 29 dipping down to 17 at times but with 4 it is a solid 30fps. I encoded some native photojpeg content that was about 2.1mb/s data rate into huge files that play faster. Wierd that black magic 10bit huge files play faster than photojpeg at half quality.

Just thought you might find this interesting.

Christian

Spam Butterfly
24-05-2004, 12:46 PM
This rather supports Richard's earlier assertions. The Blackmagic codec is an Uncompressed codec. The processor is not doing much work to decode this. With uncompressed video you need lots of drive bandwidth to get it off the drive, which is why RAID arrays are essential for uncompressed work.

With compressed video, it's the physical speed that the data can be accessed on the hard drives patters that's the key - not the sustained data rate. RAID does not help for this.

Photo-Jpeg performance has nothing to do with drive speed at all. Photo-Jpeg is an off-line format. It's generally used by content providers because it provides great compression ratios with a minimum loss of quality. However, it's heinously processor intensive to decode and encode - hence the shit performance.

Hugh

tylerr
24-05-2004, 02:49 PM
So on that note should be be converting our files to some other format that the one originally specified by High End? I believe that it was Photo Jpeg medium quality.

Tyler http://chaldee1.gotadsl.co.uk/~richardb/upload/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=949#

litemover
25-05-2004, 03:01 AM
So on that note should be be converting our files to some other format that the one originally specified by High End? I believe that it was Photo Jpeg medium quality.

Tyler http://chaldee1.gotadsl.co.uk/~richardb/upload/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=949#

I know I'm going to be now. Getting full speed accross the board without barely any compression is worth it for me.

The downside is that it takes a lot more space and you need a multi drive zero striped array.

Christian

Spam Butterfly
25-05-2004, 12:22 PM
I guess if you have the budget for the RAID array, then go uncompressed, if it's giving you the performance and quality you are after.

However DV PAL/NTSC is still the best codec to use for Catalyst, performance, and always has been. At least in Europe, DV PAL's 4:2:0 colour sampling gives better perceived colour than NTSC's 4:1:1 - hence I get less grief about this, and Tyler, I would keep your files in DV NTSC.

The content that High End has supplied in the past has been a mixture of DV and DVC Pro in NTSC format, + photojpeg stuff at medium quality.
The original v.1 media servers made in London had Photo-Jpeg content in Best quality, which was the format that it was delivered to me in (and in PAL hehehehe).

Photo-Jpeg has a number of drawbacks - the most significant is that it takes considerably more grunt to decompress it, hence this discussion. However, it has one significant advantage, other than being a great off-line format, which is that it supports resolutions other than standard definition. If you have a series of images that you want to use in your show, you may find that it's better to render these as a 'slide show' movie, and you'll get better performance.

samsc
27-05-2004, 11:47 PM
The original v.1 media servers made in London had Photo-Jpeg content in Best quality, which was the format that it was delivered to me in (and in PAL hehehehe).


which will not work on multiple layers in catalyst v3- you get the worst of both possible worlds. big files and slower decompression.

tylerr
01-12-2004, 02:10 AM
Has anyone tried a 15k RPM drive? Is there any amazing differance in preformance for twice the proce of a 10K?

Tylerhttp://chaldee1.gotadsl.co.uk/~richardb/upload/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=958#

samsc
01-12-2004, 08:03 AM
i dont think they have quite become available yet.

every manufacturer is releasing faster drives - whether they are faster for doing this type of thing remains to be seen.

Spam Butterfly
01-12-2004, 10:57 AM
I have a 15K Seagate Cheetah. No real different.

Hugh

samsc
01-12-2004, 03:00 PM
I have a 15K Seagate Cheetah. No real different.

Hugh

which one?

there are many different models.

samsc
01-12-2004, 04:38 PM
there are two different types of cheetah at 15000rpm

the older 15k.3 models
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/seagate-15k3/
only up to 75 gb i think

and the latest just released next generation 15k.4 models
i think these go up to 147gb max.
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200411/20041116ST3146754LW_1.html

samsc
01-12-2004, 04:43 PM
I dont think the 15k.4 is available just yet.

tylerr
02-12-2004, 10:02 PM
here is the drive i was looking at.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=712202

But now i think I am going to stick with what I know.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=712195

samsc
02-12-2004, 10:52 PM
yes.

sticking for now is good.

I dont have any info on the newer drives.

R

tylerr
02-12-2004, 10:54 PM
upstaging is about to have 4 hot rod cat 3 servers.

And lots of older ones.

Tyler

samsc
03-12-2004, 03:03 PM
you are using glyph external enclosures?

tylerr
03-12-2004, 03:21 PM
Since i am only installing one drive I have been putting them inside the G5.

T.

samsc
03-12-2004, 03:23 PM
and which cables are you using?

tylerr
03-12-2004, 03:38 PM
I am using

http://www.cdw.com/shop/search/Results.aspx?key=109784&platform=all&x=0&y=0

samsc
06-12-2004, 02:41 PM
I am using

http://www.cdw.com/shop/search/Results.aspx?key=109784&platform=all&x=0&y=0

does that fit into a g5?
looks a little big to me.

litemover
25-03-2007, 02:26 PM
I haven't read this whole post, I just have to say that my Raptors are still running great and very fast. They were a great investment and I never have a problem with the jitters even with high def using a 4 drive array.

Sata turned out tp be a great standard.

Christian

tharding
25-03-2007, 11:32 PM
What software do you use for the RAID?

softRAID or Apple?

Cheers

Toby

Gian
26-03-2007, 04:21 AM
I use Apple Raid, just to keep the system clean.
I used SoftRaid in the past, works fine, but we choose to leave the system with only MAcOSX so we choose the Apple

litemover
26-03-2007, 01:55 PM
apple raid. Works great and is compatible with my firmtek seritek cards.

Christian