Video Storage Drives for Edius

[Tobe]

Sas?

Is anyone using the "new" SAS drives and controllers with Edius? If so, how are they?

[JTE48]

For what it's worth, I'm using 3 external 500 GB Firewire 800 drives from Lacie. They feed into a Lacie firewire 800 pci card that was plug n play - no drivers to load to cause conflicts. I never could get firewire 400 to work well with XP. Besides they are too slow anyway.

My setup is a Edius NX Workstation 500. (dual 3.4 Xenons, 2 GB Ram) When I use raptest to test the FW800 drives I'm getting about 73 MB/sec. The internal raid 0 drive raptests at 83-87 MB/sec. I edit with the internal drive then back up everything on one of the FW800 drives. I saw at NAB that Lacie has e sata external hard drive now. You'll get another 20 MB/second in speed over the FW800 drive with one of them. So that might be an answer to video storage.

For those photogs out there . . . I'm also using a sandisk 4 GB 300x flash card with the sandisk firewire 800 card reader. I copied a 600 MB file to one of those FW800 drives in 15 seconds. That's 40MB per second. If you have a laptop and want FW800 capability, Lacie offers a slot card with firewire 800 inputs.

[GrassValley_MD]

I probably should have been more clear :)


I was talking about folks that have more than 2 or 3 layers with alpha and 3DPiP etc...


I can get two layers going on my laptop but not many more than 4 on my desktop.


Sorry about the confusion :)


Mike

[RonnieMartin]

On my current machine and the one that is in the process of being built I have used raid 5. Since my raid has about 1.2 TB there is a lot of work on it most of the time. I had one drive to go belly up and the redundant drive saved the day. I was able to replace the drive and rebuild the raid and all my work was still there. The only way I knew that a drive died was that all of a sudden I got the "drive to slow" message. I saved my 1.5 hour project and found that one of my drives was bad. "Worked for me"
Ronnie

[peterC]

Update: I got the FireWire/USB2.0 enclosures and removed the chip from it. I connected it to the IDE rack and I get good speeds.

I got around 31MB/sec for Read and 28MB/sec for write via FireWire 400, and USB2.0 was much slower, so I didn't even bother with USB. It was about 25% slower than FireWire.

Hopefully this thread helps someone in the future.

Technically this should be the other way around right? ie USB faster than FW400. I find this interesting.

Also, let us know how u go on the quad. I've been waiting 4 u! Water still a little chilly for my toe down here, hope you can warm it up a little so I can jump in. Call me chicken.....I have been sizing Macs up for a while.

Love to see if u get an NX running on it........I pulled an earlier post on this in a previous thread last week? The one where Brandon 'closed off' T-Bone, but in doing so raised more questions than he answered.

What chip did u remove? I think it's in the other thread, I'll backtrack to see if I get u.

[peterC]

But some cases (read: the eSATA chip) are very picky about the controller they are attached to. I found controllers with Silicon Image chipsets the most reliable.

Yes SI supposedly, but I had to return one of these. It refused to see anything but 1 of the 3 channels. eSata no, primary ch no, secondary ch yes. The vendor couldn't get it to run either.

The chipset of flavour for ext enclsr is the Oxford 924?

[STORMDAVE]

Update: I got the FireWire/USB2.0 enclosures and removed the chip from it. I connected it to the IDE rack and I get good speeds.

I got around 31MB/sec for Read and 28MB/sec for write via FireWire 400, and USB2.0 was much slower, so I didn't even bother with USB. It was about 25% slower than FireWire.

Hopefully this thread helps someone in the future.

[STORMDAVE]

There are a few uncompressed HD flavors. 10bit, 8bit, 1080p, 720p etc...Usually editing with these files will require a very speedy RAID setup, and lots of space.

When speaking of HD in the "Desktop" software of Canopus, we're usually talking about Canopus HQ files or HDV (MPEG2 TS) files. Canopus HQ is around 100mbps for 1080i under online quality, and HDV is a fixed rate for 1080i ...25mbps, which is the same for DV. HDV files need fast computers, but it uses less space. HQ files don't need that fast of a computer, but it eats about 3-4 times as much space as HDV files.

[Philip]

To recap and add my own :)


2. For HD a raid is a must if you are going to be doing any layering - I also got 2 streams of HAD going on my laptop but I could get no more. If I added a filter I was dead!

So if you are going to be doing any real layering at all with HD you will need a raid 0 or equivalent.


Mike

Mike.....when you say a RAID is a must for HD editing with any real layering are you talking HQ files or HDV files. I have edited a 2 camera ceremony in HQ and a dual core desktop. I used multicam and had one color correction on each layer. Worked great. That was editing off a slow USB2.0 drive that gets about 6+ times RT throughput.

I just got a eSATA card for my laptop and hooked it up to an eSATA enclosure with a SATA drive. I got 15+ times RT throughput or 500+ frames per second. (assuming SD editing). If I was able to edit 2 streams in multicam just fine with an old USB 2.0 drive and CanopusHQ files I would think 3 cams will be fine on an eSATA drive as long as you don't load up the filters on the stream.

When you mention editing in HD are you talking uncompressed? If so of course you need a RAID. If you only need 2-3 streams on HQ I still feel eSATA/SATA is more than adequate.

[Philip]

To recap and add my own :)


2. For HD a raid is a must if you are going to be doing any layering - I also got 2 streams of HAD going on my laptop but I could get no more. If I added a filter I was dead!

So if you are going to be doing any real layering at all with HD you will need a raid 0 or equivalent.


Mike

Mike.....when you say a RAID is a must for HD editing with any real layering are you talking HQ files or HDV files. I have edited a 2 camera ceremony in HQ and a dual core desktop. I used multicam and had one color correction on each layer. Worked great. That was editing off a slow USB2.0 drive that gets about 6+ times RT throughput.

I just got a eSATA card for my laptop and hooked it up to an eSATA enclosure with a SATA drive. I got 15+ times RT throughput or 500+ frames per second. (assuming SD editing). If I was able to edit 2 streams in multicam just fine with an old USB 2.0 drive and CanopusH

[Zorro]

You can do external eSATA RAID0 setups also, and build your own RAID instead of buying ready to own ones and save a bunch of money.

That's correct. Like these:

http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=1&pid=3

http://www.stardom.com.tw/sohoraid.htm

But some cases (read: the eSATA chip) are very picky about the controller they are attached to. I found controllers with Silicon Image chipsets the most reliable.

[STORMDAVE]

eSATA is really a great way to connect externally and get internal drive speeds. You can do external eSATA RAID0 setups also, and build your own RAID instead of buying ready to own ones and save a bunch of money.

As for SD, it depends on what kind of "SD" you're working with. DV is SD and it requires about 3.6MB/sec per stream. There is also uncompressed SD that Edius supports, which is about 20MB/sec per stream (Without Alpha). If you're just straight doing DV, then a single external drive is perfect.

[peterC]

You can buy eSata I or II controllers. For use to internal and/or external drives. PCI, PCI-X, PCIe. They all offer different features/performance. eg 150Gps, 3Gps, Raid, Jbod, Tagged queing,etc.
What you want to watch out for is proprietry formatting to the MBR of the HDD in question. It can cause issues taking an ext enclosure/drive to another system that uses a different controller.

Other than that, once you use SataII ext, you won't think about USB 2 or FW800. For archive, file swapping or otherwise (eg editing off exts to any system, either desktop or laptop) .

Remember, most SataII drives come jumpered to SataI so this needs to be removed if you want the full performance of SataII drives realised.

Dave, you asked earlier in another thread about exts for MAc/XP crossover/interchange and IDE to USB/eSata. There is one drive enclosure in particular that offers USB 2, FW400,FW800, is fan cooled with int p/s. Looks like a macPro case(brushed alum). Can't recall if it offered IDE i/f, know it gave you SI/II. Not cheap here in Aus.

The other dilemma I faced was fan cool or no? Mixed opinions.

Passive heat dissipation is enough, some say. Others also say, cheap fans when you can find an enclosure that has them (are hard to find), so not to be trusted to function that well. Also the story that these create extra vibration, so possibly long term accelerated HDD damage. Your call, just some 'think abouts.'

[kwshaw1]

For HD a raid is a must if you are going to be doing any layering...

Can you clarify what sort of HD work you're referring to here? As noted in my earlier post, Canopus HQ at standard quality only requires about 10 MB/sec per layer, which means 2-3 layers (or more) should be feasible on a good single hard drive. Or if you're working with HDV footage in its native format then hard drive requirements should be the same as for DV, which is quite manageable on a single drive. Not that RAID won't help for any complex editing task, but to say it's required calls for some elaboration on when it's required.

[GrassValley_MD]

Hi, I have a custom built PC with a Pentium D 3.6ghz and 2gig DDR2 ram. I currently use Adobe Premiere but will be purchasing Edius to use to edit P2 files from my Panasonic HVX200 camera (DVCpro HD video files).

My understanding is that I need to raid 0 stripe 2 drives together in order to get the best realtime functionality with Edius, correct? I assume the best/economical way would be to plug in 2 SATA drives into my motherboard.
What about these Western Digital My Book Pro II external firewire drives. Will they work as well for an external storage solution?

Thanks for any advice.

To recap and add my own :)


1. For SD you really do not need a raid anymore (depending on your work) - On my dell laptop I got 7 layers of SD playing with 6 of it in 3DPiP flying around the screen. This was on the system drive so there was no special hardware anywhere.

If you are doing HEAVY layering then a raid might come into play.

2. For HD a raid is a must if you are going to be doing any layering - I also got 2 streams of HAD going on my laptop but I could get no more. If I added a filter I was dead!

So if you are going to be doing any real layering at all with HD you will need a raid 0 or equivalent.


3. External drives - Once again, this depends on your work flow BUT they are the slowest alturnative. Unless they are a full SATA interface. They are great for storage and if you are not doing layering they will work for editing but I would rather do the interal raids.



Mike