7 HD's inside a mac pro

[samsc]

These guys put 7 HD's inside a mac pro....

http://www.hardmac.com/news/2006-10-04/#5993

[emilianomorgia]

will help speed to use one Hd per layer ?

let's say we copy the content in 7 hd , and we use 7 layers .

Layer one use content from hd 1
Layer two use content from hd 2

and so one ...

Does this help playback speed ?

thanks

[SourceChild]

And the ideas Blow Me Away!

These guys put 7 HD's inside a mac pro....

http://www.hardmac.com/news/2006-10-04/#5993

Richard, Emiliano
I was blown away by an Epiphany today and these two posts reflect the results of that.
I have been researching the system configuration shown in the article above and have derived the following results.
First of all, By removing the CD drives and putting in the modified HD Drive Bay, we can add three drives of whatever we want. I did some further investigation, and found that I can assemble a rig where drives can be configured 2 x 2 instead allowing for four total additional drives. There would be a requirement for additional fans but looking at the Optical drive shuttle, I am relatively sure that something could be machined to make a four drive modular SCSI bay with added cooling to make sure that the flow-through into the power supply was sufficient to vent the PS heat as well as the new additional heat from the SCSI disks. I am a bit concerned with the power capacity of the PS but I can always check with Apple. If everything is within acceptable ranges then I would propose the following configuration.
Mac Pro Configuration:

Apple Configuration:

· 2 x 3.0GHz Dual Core Xeon
· 4 x 1Gb Memory Simms
· Quadro FX 4500 Video Card
Buss Configuration:

· PCI Express Slot 1: Video Card
· PCI Express Slot 2: Atto ExpressPCI UL5D
· PCI Express Slot 3: Atto ExpressPCI UL5D
· PCI Express Slot 4: Blackmagic Decklink HD Pro PCIe
New Drive Chassis:

· Slot 1: 146Gb 15k Disk on Controller 1a
· Slot 2: 146Gb 15k Disk on Controller 1b
· Slot 3: 146Gb 15k Disk on Controller 2a
· Slot 4: 146Gb 15k Disk on Controller 2b
Existing Drive Chassis:

· Slot 1: 500Gb SATA Disk (dual boot partitions)
· Slot 2: 500Gb SATA Disk (RAID 5 disk 1)
· Slot 3: 500Gb SATA Disk (RAID 5 disk 2)
· Slot 4: 500Gb SATA Disk (RAID 5 disk 3)
If we start with a preconfigured Mac Pro, the I?m estimating only an additional $5000 in hardware for capture card, SCSI cards, and SCSI disks to make this a viable solution. This would then be the HD solution for running 4 layers of 720p HD across two outputs or perhaps 2 Layers of 1080p HD on a single output.

We could then run the widescreen configuration to two projectors for out 720p solution or use a Triple Head 2 Go on a single output to three projectors for our 1080p solution.

[SourceChild]

Another Epiphany

...let's say we copy the content in 7 hd , and we use 7 layers .

Layer one use content from hd 1
Layer two use content from hd 2

I am very curious about this

What I normally do:

What I do when I create content that I sync, is that I use the convention of numbering files with the same offset and I skip numbers.
Let's say, I have three screens, I would use the following convention.

o 000 (No File Used)
o 001 File1 CT.mov
o 002 File1 RT.mov
o 003 File1 LF.mov
o 004 File2 CT.mov
o 005 File2 RT.mov
o 006 File2 LF.mov
o 007 File3 CT.mov
o 008 File3 RT.mov
o 009 File3 LF.mov
o 010 (No File Used)
o 011 File4 CT.mov
o 012 File4 LF.mov
o 013 File4 RT.mov

Obviously, when I jump each decade, I would start over again at xx1 and continue to xx3 for the next file until I have saturated the decade at xx9.

What I could do:

Considering this new idea of using different drives, I consider this.
SCSI Disk 1:

001 Left Content Group 1
001 File1 LF.mov
002 File2 LF.mov
003 File3 LF.mov
004 File4 LF.mov
SCSI Disk 2:

002 Left Content Group 2
001 File1 LF.mov
002 File2 LF.mov
003 File3 LF.mov
004 File4 LF.mov
SCSI Disk 3:

003 Right Content Group 1
001 File1 RT.mov
002 File2 RT.mov
003 File3 RT.mov
004 File4 RT.mov
SCSI Disk 4:

004 Right Content Group 2
001 File1 RT.mov
002 File2 RT.mov
003 File3 RT.mov
004 File4 RT.mov

With this convention, I would name the folder on disk 1 001, disk 2 002, etc so that when the Cat scans, it finds its correct folder structure.

If you also noticed, this convention would have a duplicate folder of each group of content. The idea I have here is that if I wanted to run two layers of content, I could run file1 on layer1 from disk1 and file2 on layer2 from disk2 and then perhaps crossfade again to layer1 for file3 on from disk1 again.

This way, no single disk ever has to seek more than one MOV file at a time.

[samsc]

Does not work the way you imagine.

The operating system, and quicktime are 'single threaded', meaning adding more discs doesnt do anything.
Frame access is sequential. Not sumultaneous.

And the overall performance is as slow as the slowest disc -

I have tested this. and continue to test - in case apple changes the way things work.
At the moment - it doesnt.

[SourceChild]

Yes Richard,
I found out more about this as I looked into it. Nevertheless, it would still make a plausible solution for having a SCSI based RAID Stripe set internally. However, I am looking into several different SCSI controllers to see about solutions with larger data buffers.
Compared to an xServe RAID running SATA disks, a SCSI raid will always have faster disk seek times but it's a matter of eliminating the controller bottleneck. Obviously this is the advantage of the xServeRAID but I would prefer to find a way to have an encapsulated single machine solution for doing HD files.

Give me your feedback on the use of internal SCSI Raids and what cards you've used. Have you tried a 4 disk stripe or just a typical 2 disk stripe?
One thought is to use two SCSI controllers that will do hardware striping and then use OSX to perform a software stripe across two controllers.

[samsc]

there is only 1 source of PCIe scsi cards for mac? atto?

you want something that works. get an xserve raid. even with just 4 drives.

messing with scsi raids isnt fun. your thinking is getting too complex. with no performance gain.

[tharding]

The xServe is so low fuss. I have the system that Richard describes and I can run 2 Cats from it without a fibre channel router.

The extra features of the xserve that are worth noting are:

1. Fibre channel is so straight forward. One cable to connect which can run substantial distances if required.

2. Dual redundant power supplies, Cooling systems, Battery backup for cache.

I had a G5 die on me the other day and I was able to swap it out in 10 minutes because all I had to do was swap a card and install the Catalyst software. If I had a machine loaded with drives and cards this wouldn't be so simple.

I think you would find that the XServe is very cost competitive when compared to that much SCSI hardware.

cheers

Toby

[RedLightning]

I am in the process of setting up my system and was looking at the option of 1x250gig system drive 3x500gig 10000 RPM SATA drives using Apple disk utility to set up the RAID.
Primarily a non-HD system but I will be buying the Blackmagic Multibridge Pro...

-s

[tharding]

Have a look at SoftRAID. It comes fairly highly recommended as an alternative to the Apple RAID utility.

Cheers

Toby