Is it nessesary to "raid"?

[Gunn]

I will be editing 1080P. My set up has four 500GB Sata drives. Is it necessary to set all the drives on a raid? Isn't 500GB fast enough for a 100GB project?

JoJo

[gdame]

I will be editing 1080P. My set up has four 500GB Sata drives. Is it necessary to set all the drives on a raid? Isn't 500GB fast enough for a 100GB project?

JoJo

JoJo, The size of the project is not reletive to your hard disk throughput speeds or needs. It is the format of the video that you are editing and how many streams of that video will be used at the thickest part of your edit. If you have a section of your timeline that will be playing four video clips at once and you are in a canopus 1080 HQ format then you will need more than a single drive to deliver the clips smoothly. Heck this would be the case even if it was a 30 sec. commercial. 2 SATA-300 drives striped raid 0 provide a nice level of performance if connected to a hardware raid controller. Note, some seagate SATA-300 drives ship out of the box as set to SATA-150. You need to pull a tiny jumper off in order to enable SATA-300. A lot of people do not know this!

[Gunn]

JoJo, The size of the project is not reletive to your hard disk throughput speeds or needs. It is the format of the video that you are editing and how many streams of that video will be used at the thickest part of your edit. If you have a section of your timeline that will be playing four video clips at once and you are in a canopus 1080 HQ format then you will need more than a single drive to deliver the clips smoothly. Heck this would be the case even if it was a 30 sec. commercial. 2 SATA-300 drives striped raid 0 provide a nice level of performance if connected to a hardware raid controller. Note, some seagate SATA-300 drives ship out of the box as set to SATA-150. You need to pull a tiny jumper off in order to enable SATA-300. A lot of people do not know this!

Back to the drawing board. I will set up all four 500gb drives on one raid. The two operating systems will be on a separate smaller drive. Back up will be on an external drive.

Thanks,
JoJo

[Bassman]

If you have a section of your timeline that will be playing four video clips at once and you are in a canopus 1080 HQ format then you will need more than a single drive to deliver the clips smoothly.

What if one had these four clips each on a separate drive?

Would the raid still be necessary?

I am assuming when you mention four video clips, you mean four different cameras?

Or does this apply to four copies of one camera's feed?

[gdame]

What if one had these four clips each on a separate drive?

Would the raid still be necessary?

I am assuming when you mention four video clips, you mean four different cameras?

Or does this apply to four copies of one camera's feed?

Seperate drives for each clip/stream of video would be a fine way to spread out the load. Media management may get a little messy but will work. Also it would depend on the controller/s that these drive are connected to and the type of load that puts on the CPU.

Yes, I was reffering to four seperate video files.

One of my customers did a five camera multi-cam edit on one of my systems and the video played back smoothly while performing the multicam edit. When that was done he exported that segment to a single HQ clip of the same specs and it looked great.

His raid is a four x 1TB SATA-II raid set up as 0+1. That's 2TB fully redundant. If a drive does fail data is not lost and performance stays the same while that drive is being replaced. So that is why I sold him 5 drives and one stays in the drawer.

[DigitalDave]

George
I am currently considering the options for a new system but am trying to get my head around raid options.

At present I edit SD and use removable caddies. I have over 20. These get swapped around 3 systems at odd times.
For SD or 1080i........
I want the security of not losing any data should a drive fail.
The ability to be able archive a completed project (not just a single AVI) to a single drive either in a caddy or external box.
The flexibility of having external raid that can be put onto a different sytem. ie from a NX system to an OHCI.

I have probably missed something but that will do for starters- thanks.

David

[gdame]

George
I am currently considering the options for a new system but am trying to get my head around raid options.

At present I edit SD and use removable caddies. I have over 20. These get swapped around 3 systems at odd times.
For SD or 1080i........
I want the security of not losing any data should a drive fail.
The ability to be able archive a completed project (not just a single AVI) to a single drive either in a caddy or external box.
The flexibility of having external raid that can be put onto a different system. ie from a NX system to an OHCI.

I have probably missed something but that will do for starters- thanks.

David

Hi Dave,

I feel that storage options and project management solutions vary from client to client. It really depends on the type of products that you produce. The size of these projects, how long you need to archive them and the speed to retrieve an archived project.

These variables can help determine the best solution for your work-flow. I break storage up into three categories.

On-line, Near-line & Off-line.

On-line being your current projects at hand and would consist of a fast and redundant raid array that can take a beating and keep on going in the event of a drive failure. The size of this would be determined by the size of your average project and how many you are working on at once as well as how long does it take for you to get all client approvals and be finished before moving to the near-line or off-line storage.

Near-line would be for those projects that occupy a larger chunk of your on-line storage and are projects that linger longer than usual before they reach completion. This solution can vary in speed of backup and recovery and they can be simply external firewire drives or a rack of network drives on a gigabit LAN. NAS (network attached storage) modules can be redundant or JBOD (just a bunch of drives). These are great because of there scalability.

Off-line could be simply hard drives but that is a more costly solution. I have been providing off-line solutions to customers for 15 years going back to DDS-2 tape solutions. Today I recommend just archiving data to Blu-Ray disks. Low cost, long life and relatively fast recovery. If restoring an offline project from Blu-Ray to your on-line storage is at an inconvenient time for your current project load or workflow. Then just have a simple system with a Blu-Ray reader in it to facilitate moving that data to the NAS (near-line) storage. Later you can then swap that project to your on-line storage after you juggle the projects that are currently on there.

So, as you can see it can get complex. But I have always recommended these three levels of storage for full projects. I am not a fan of saving just the project files and batch capture lists and hoping that I can find all the resources to recapture and pray that all goes well in restoring a project.

let me know more about your projects and I can make a better assessment of a solution for you.

[DigitalDave]

I am not a fan of saving just the project files and batch capture lists and hoping that I can find all the resources to recapture and pray that all goes well in restoring a project.

let me know more about your projects and I can make a better assessment of a solution for you.

Firstly thank you for your in -depth reply. I would clarify that archiving projects to HD is lock stock and the last logo. Definately not doing a re-batch capture - used to do it that way in the Days of my beloved DPS Perception - but then a 9GB HD was £800.

Is there anyway that an external Raid can be "swapped" between systems?

David

[gdame]

Firstly thank you for your in -depth reply. I would clarify that archiving projects to HD is lock stock and the last logo. Definately not doing a re-batch capture - used to do it that way in the Days of my beloved DPS Perception - but then a 9GB HD was £800.

Is there anyway that an external Raid can be "swapped" between systems?

David

Sure, swapping external drives or raids can be done but they would need the same controllers and connectors on each system. There is a myriad of external SATA solutions that range from simple eSATA to Infiniband and various port multiplier schemes. I personally do not like connecting and disconnecting storage interface connections on a repeated and regular basis due to the wear and tear that will result in bad connections and that could lead to corrupt data. How about enough storage at each system and a fast network. Map each systems drive onto each desktop and that would make things easy to move around. What is the size of an average project that you would need to move?

[GrassValley_MD]

Firstly thank you for your in -depth reply. I would clarify that archiving projects to HD is lock stock and the last logo. Definately not doing a re-batch capture - used to do it that way in the Days of my beloved DPS Perception - but then a 9GB HD was £800.

Is there anyway that an external Raid can be "swapped" between systems?

David

You bet :) Have done it for years but you need to make sure that the external raid is going to meet your transfer rate requirements.

Mike