Raid solution for 2k dpx realtime

[Wahookah]

Hi,

we are working with 2k, 10 bit, dpx files, for color grading (single stream)
We will be working on Resolve on Mac (yep, we have a tight budget )
I have seen 2k dpx realtime with Resolve on Mac at IBC using around 8 nodes of color correction and it was still realtime, so it should be possible...

we would look for a raid solution to play these files in realtime (about 350 Mbits/s garanteed as overhead).

I found various solution per fibre channel in a price range of about 8 000 -
10 000 € total with a controller.
Does anybody know a budget solution, maybe via eSata?

I was talking to someone at IBC who was telling me about two eSata enclosures each equipped with 8 drives as a raid 5 and then those two raid5 are striped as a raid 0. Does anyone have experience with that kind of system?

I would be glad if anybody could share their thoughts or give me some recommendations.

thanks

[andrewhake]

A Mac Pro with a decent raid card and a 4 drive RAID 0 setup should work just fine as well. I think it is even one of the supported options by Davinci.

Using a 3.5 to 5.25 adapter to have your OS on a HDD in one of the optical bays, or use an SSD, and use the 4 internal HDD sleds to hold the RAID HDDs with a good RAID card, even the Apple Mac Pro RAID card is listed as supported by Davinci I believe.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/dow...='CalDigit'

[dupsta]

Not sure your budget? But here is some food for thought.

Spend the money on speed and not storage. So do a raid 0, since all you are doing is playback, do not save to this raid 0. Keep all meta data and back up file on a slower secure drive not intended for playback.
Most likely you will not need tons of storage and you can move shots on to the fast drive and shots off as storage fills.

solution 1)
Raiding SSDs is fast, very simple to do, done through esata, but you pay for speed and simplicity but you sacrifice volume storage at today's price point. You could raid 3 SSDs at raid 0 and reach 300mbs minimum which is what you need for DPXs. Now again, no security, this is not storage as you will lose all data in raid 0, but you know this, that is why you have all your mission critical data on your server most likely. Do not save to this raid, you seem to just want a raid that reads, you probably do not care about write speeds. You could have all three SSDs in the Mac pros drive bays. Simple, clean, fast, little pricey and low storage volume.
Or...
get a PCIe eSata 4 port card, a 4 drive raid enclosure, with built in firmware/hardware controller card, raid 0 four drives.
This too is fast, but now you have tons more storage than the 3 SSDs solution, however, it is not as simple, you will need: raid enclosure w or without a port multiplier, 4 drives, PCIe Card (PM), eSata cables, and do not forget you have to have a UPS power back up for the raid enclosure.

Those are budget solutions,

One more time for the masses, a raid 0 is not a storage solution, raid 0 is only for a playback solutions as all your files are not safe. I hope that is clear as people might get squeamish with the word "Raid 0"

Now if you don't want to think about anything, and have a couple grand.
buy the G-Tech es Pro.

Good luck! Hope you can find something in here that helps?

[raksol]

Thanks for the input dupsta ! Great tips

[Wahookah]

Thank you for all the good input

The thing is that i need space for a least feture film length + some spare space, which pretty much leaves SSDs and internal Raids out of the game.

As a budget solution i actually was considering raid 0, but getting raid 5 with for almost the same price with an external enclosure sounds llike a good option. It´s just a matter of finding a good external solution .
I also want to get a complete system that is tested.

Thank your for the link to the g-technology website, this is pretty much what i´m looking for. The only thing i´m not sure about is whether i should go for the G-SPEED eS PRO that claims it can do single 2K DPX sequence in realtime or the G-SPEED eS Pro XL with 12 drives.

One of the g-speed support guys in their creative cow forum pointed out
"The G-SPEED 6Bay will not be able to play back 2K files. The G-SPEED XL 12 or 16 bay works very well."
so against their own specification i guess that it has to be the G-SPEED eS Pro XL.

In another thread someone pointed out that they used those raids with Resolve at IBC and NAB, so that should be the solution that i saw running smoothly there...

thank you for your inputs, if anyone has some more recommendations plz go ahead...

[raksol]

Im using 3 drives in a RAID at the moment for my Nuke cache. But they are 5400RPM and i'm getting the same performance with the RAID as I'm getting with my 7200RPM system disk (alone, not raided) :/

However, when doing a speed test; I'm getting around 260mb/s read /write on my RAID, and about 100mb/s on my 7200RPM OS disk.

Anyone got any idea about what to do to ? Cheers!

[Charles Angus]

Im using 3 drives in a RAID at the moment for my Nuke cache. But they are 5400RPM and i'm getting the same performance with the RAID as I'm getting with my 7200RPM system disk (alone, not raided) :/

However, when doing a speed test; I'm getting around 260mb/s read /write on my RAID, and about 100mb/s on my 7200RPM OS disk.

Anyone got any idea about what to do to ? Cheers!

My experience is similar. Despite my RAID testing at 300 MB/s, Nuke never pulls more than about 25 MB/s.

[Gravy]

If you're looking to make your own RAID system to save some money. The Proavio enclosures are really good. And, reasonably priced.

http://www.proavio.com/

You can get their 4 bay and 8 bay with a miniSAS:
http://www.proavio.com/eb4ms.html
http://www.proavio.com/eb8ms.html

[raksol]

Won't help much if we can't set up Nuke correctly though
Something seems wrong about scanline playback / cache together with a RAID setup... can't figure it out

[Wahookah]

Just to let you know:

Our reseller offered a Dulce PRO DQ -8 Raid system, he said that they had good experience with them and you can play back 2k projects in realtime.

If you are interested i can report back in about 2-3 weeks...

[Wahookah]

We use the Dulce Raid for a couple of weeks now and i to say we´re pretty content with it, 2k 10 bit dpx files at max 45 frames per second, half the drives being full, i did not expect that.

What i like most is that it´s very sturdy build, a metal case that looks a little bit like a military radio unit