hard drives

[Spam Butterfly]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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-

[litemover]

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]

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

[samsc]

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]

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.