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Thread: Hard Drives

  1. #1

    Hard Drives

    As evrebody knows from this forum, Catalyst needs a great drive to work nicely. SAMSC always quote THE HARD DRIVERS are the most important part here, or at least one of.

    We are running at the momenrt a MacPro, with one drive for System and
    3 SATA2 3Gbs 250Mb each Drives in RAID 0 Internal of the MacPro for Content.

    I wanna have the best performance as possible, and even start working with High Definition Movies. So I think in some options, please share your experiences and what you guys belive are the best at the moment (also considering cost possibilities)

    Option A. As is 3 SATA2 RAID 0 Internal

    Option B. Change the regular drivers for RAPTORS 10K 3 in RAID0 config
    they will be in SATA1, 1,5Gbs

    Option C. External SCSI Ultra Card with 2 SCSI Drivers in RAID0

    Option D. A XSERVE RAID (I look at Apple and the drivers are IDE ????)
    But all the coments are those are great.

    The internal of the MacPro are not faster than those XServes RAID ???

    on options C and D we can still use also the Internal Drivers as second content folders

    I apprecciate any comments on what is the best option....

    Regards
    Gian
    Ibeam SP
    SP, Brasil

  2. #2

  3. #3
    in this game you get what you pay for.

    you pay more money you get things that work better.

    ---

    disc systems have both a sequential access disc speed and a random access disc speed.

    if you take this page as an example-

    http://www.barefeats.com/hard88.html

    everyone keeps going on about how this disc or that disc does 200MB/s.....buts thats with a single file - that is read sequentially in one go. All these disc tests measuring a single large file are a mirage.

    The reality is that when you ask a disc to do 2 things at once - ( catalyst needs each playback layer to work at the same time ) - most of these sata discs and disc systems have terrible performance.

    Sata discs have very poor latency - when asked to do 2 things at once - they have long delays.
    Doesnt matter how many discs you connect together in a RAID - they still dont work well when asked to do more than one thing at a time.

    ---

    A chart like the one shown below - which is from
    storagereview.com - shows random access file performance across multiple disc types.

    And it shows most normal sata drives at 90, raptor at 130, and best scsi at 250.
    Attached Images Attached Images

  4. #4
    OK, so lets say on my options, a

    SCSI is the top 1
    Raptor is 2
    Sata is far below....

    But regarding Macs, Internal RAID SATA2 on a mac, on my resarch are fast as WD Raptors... may be not in Latency and all OK.

    But a XSERVE RAID, is like a very very good, nut has IDE drivers internally ? Or this is not that fast.

    From what I read so far and researched, a ULTRA SCSI Card and 2 SCSI in RAID0, for HD movies looks a nice go.

    What you guys think, and any recomendations on Brand and Kind, or any ULTRA 320 2 channels are OK, independent of brand - PCI-e

    Thanks to all
    Gian
    Ibeam SP
    SP, Brasil

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Gian
    OK, so lets say on my options, a

    But regarding Macs, Internal RAID SATA2 on a mac, on my resarch are fast as WD Raptors... may be not in Latency and all OK.
    Only with meaningless - single file - sequential access files.

    The headline data transfer rate is meaningless - Catalyst needs to be rated with random access files.

    The only program you can benchmark with catalyst is catalyst...

    You want to test the above for yourself - get some sata drives and get a raptor - and see what happens.
    You need to be aware as well that sata drives do not have equal performance either. there are large and meaningful differences between brands.

  6. #6
    XServe raid has an enormous buffer - 512MB/channel - so it can read lots of data at once.
    thats why it works well.

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