Raid

C

ChadN

Well-known member
Hey all, i'm just full of questions now that i've got the 7Q and i'm looking to upgrade across the board.

I'm interested in getting a RAID set up. Of course, i know very little about it. I've tried to read about it online and it's hard to find info about it in regards to editing and storing footage.

I'm not that interested in storing 4K RAW forever. I'd probably render our final videos out and eventually delete the original footage.

I'm mostly interested in performance, having the space to keep a two or three hours worth of 4K RAW (say for a music video), and speed while editing (if this effects it at all)

What kind of purchase am i looking at?
 
+1 on this question. It seems trying to use SSD to edit off of just isn't fast enough to handle the requirements of 4k RAW, and I feel the hard drive speed is where I'm having the real bottleneck right now.
 
dapoopta said:
+1 on this question. It seems trying to use SSD to edit off of just isn't fast enough to handle the requirements of 4k RAW, and I feel the hard drive speed is where I'm having the real bottleneck right now.
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You're not going to get much faster speeds than an SSD, unless you're planning on dropping major dough on a setup. My Thunderbolt RAID (Pegasus R4) gets about an average of 550MB/s write speeds (running a test w/ 4GB 4K 10-bit as the test file) with AJA Disk Speed Test. That's about the same as an SSD. So if you're having issues editing from an SSD, then I don't think disk speeds are your bottleneck.

That said, a RAID is the best way to get SSD-like speeds with significantly larger storage space for less money.

Take for example:
Promise Pegasus2 R4 (Thunderbolt 2 RAID enclosure, diskless) - $699
4x 3TB drives - ~$150 each = 600.
So for about $1300, you have a RAID5 setup with 9TB of usable space. It has built in protection so if one drive fails, you can rebuild the RAID without losing any data.
 
I'm getting 500-550 MB/s with Samsung Evo 1Tb SSD's and the Samsung Magician utility. Without the utility, these SSD's are averaging 400MBps. Either way, plenty fast enough for me with the limited 4K stuff I'm playing with. And I haven't even tried to RAID 0 them yet.
 
cuervo said:
I'm getting 500-550 MB/s with Samsung Evo 1Tb SSD's and the Samsung Magician utility. Without the utility, these SSD's are averaging 400MBps. Either way, plenty fast enough for me with the limited 4K stuff I'm playing with. And I haven't even tried to RAID 0 them yet.
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I'm sure you'd get some fast speeds but two 1TB EVOs costs over $900. RAID0 them and you're still only getting 1TB of space. Perfectly fine if you're just playing with 4K stuff, but completely unrealistic for a project. 1TB is only about 52min of 4K RAW.
 
RAID0 is 2Tb. And 2x 1Tb SSD's=2 Tb.
If you're thinking RAID5, then, my opinion is that I don't need RAID5 for an SSD "working" drive.
You can buy a Pegasus R4 RAID for around $850, but, with 4 x 1Tb, mechanical spinning HD's, I wouldn't feel safe in any config except RAID5, which is 2 Tb total storage + 2Tb backup. So, in the end, it's about the same; but with the pegasus, you have this massive brick to carry around. Or, you could go for 8Tb total Pegasus R8 for $1500. They'll all give you around 500MB/sec. The thing is, as you fill up a spinning platter HD, they slow down. SSD's maintain their data rate, pretty much, consistently without all that mechanical stuff. Plus, a decent RAID controller card will run you upwards of another $1500. And, that's assuming you have a PCIe slot for the RAID controller. Not an option for portable(read:laptop) editing on the fly. SSD's are so so easily transportable; and will make that magical 500 MB/s data rate without a RAID config. And in a hot plug package like a BMD Multidock, well, I'm very happy with this setup.

Clearly, not an acceptable configuration for long form, feature length editing. But, It works really well for my 4K needs.
 
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I have an 8 disk/2TB raid 6 getting around 670 MB/s. With that set up I have around 10.75 TB of available space and I can afford to loose 2 drives without loosing any data. I origionally wanted to do a raid 5 but looking at the difference in speed which really isn't all that much faster I went with a raid 6 for the redundancy. I couldn't be happier. Get a good raid comtroller card, on board raid (mobo) is risky and try for enterprise drives. The lower timeout readings, vibration control and warranties are always better and usually more suited for raid set ups.
 
Is there a test I can do to see where my bottleneck in 4k editing is? If the SSD is fast enough to handle the speeds of 4k RAW, then I need to figure out why I'm not playing real time in premiere, I thought it was the drive.
 
The best test I've found is the Disk Speed Test that comes as an add-on to BMD software. It's calibrated for various file formats. After a lot of testing, it's apparent to me that many of the interface devices offered on the market don't have thruput that meets the disk performance. USB2, for sure, won't cut it, and only a few USB3 devices work with high enough performance levels. SATA III, with a 6GB/sec HD is also no guarantee, it depends on the interface being used. The only interface guaranteed to be as fast as the HD needs, is Thunderbolt. Most RAID setups hardly offer an advantage to thruput; and, are actually bottlenecks. Only the higher end RAID controllers really accelerate thruput rates.

As a side note, Resolve 10.0.4 won't playback 24fps realtime unless you set the resolution to 1/4. This isn't a disk speed issue, but, rather a processor limitation. The solution to that problem is $4k in dual Quadro GPU's.
 
yeah, sorry, I shoulda been more specific. It downloads as part of several software packages, primarily, Decklink or Ultrastudio ....free on their website.
 
dapoopta said:
Is there a test I can do to see where my bottleneck in 4k editing is? If the SSD is fast enough to handle the speeds of 4k RAW, then I need to figure out why I'm not playing real time in premiere, I thought it was the drive.
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Probably processor/GPU? This is why beefy footage like RED RAW has the RED Rocket card to boost editing performance. You're also experiencing why post places do offline editing with proxies and then reconnect the full quality files only for color correction and output.

cuervo said:
RAID0 is 2Tb. And 2x 1Tb SSD's=2 Tb.
If you're thinking RAID5, then, my opinion is that I don't need RAID5 for an SSD "working" drive.
You can buy a Pegasus R4 RAID for around $850, but, with 4 x 1Tb, mechanical spinning HD's, I wouldn't feel safe in any config except RAID5, which is 2 Tb total storage + 2Tb backup. So, in the end, it's about the same; but with the pegasus, you have this massive brick to carry around. Or, you could go for 8Tb total Pegasus R8 for $1500. They'll all give you around 500MB/sec. The thing is, as you fill up a spinning platter HD, they slow down. SSD's maintain their data rate, pretty much, consistently without all that mechanical stuff. Plus, a decent RAID controller card will run you upwards of another $1500. And, that's assuming you have a PCIe slot for the RAID controller. Not an option for portable(read:laptop) editing on the fly. SSD's are so so easily transportable; and will make that magical 500 MB/s data rate without a RAID config. And in a hot plug package like a BMD Multidock, well, I'm very happy with this setup.

Clearly, not an acceptable configuration for long form, feature length editing. But, It works really well for my 4K needs.
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You're right, sorry. I was thinking of RAID1. Also, RAID5 only loses 25% of storage space with four drives. So you'd get 3TB of usable space w/ four 1TB drives. You're right that it's not as portable, but a 4TB RAID is pretty paltry these days, 3TB drives are marginally more expensive than 1TB drives. For less than the price of three 1TB SSDs, you can get a Pegasus2 + four 3TB drives, equaling 9TB of usable storage. Worth it, IMO. It's also worth mentioning that half of that money spent on the RAID is on the enclosure itself, which should (in theory) last a few years. My Pegasus came with 4TB (3TB usable), upgraded to 8TB (6TB usable), and is now at 12TB (9TB usable).
 
jshbckr said:
You're also experiencing why post places do offline editing with proxies and then reconnect the full quality files only for color correction and output.
Click to expand...

After shooting a few test shots in 4K Raw, i'm suddenly interested in working with it more often. Man, it looks amazing. I've never tried editing with proxies, but i may have to look in to this!
 
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