Truth be told Harm, I wouldn't touch an SSD with a 10 foot pole, not at THOSE prices, that's why I interjected the RAID card and drives, but I didn't want to scare Bill off. It's obviously easier to throw in an SSD, so I gave a totally neutral sappy safe answer. But I personally have never touched or seen one in person and have zero desire. I mean, $2.00USD per gigabyte is insane when you can get real drives for a nickle per gig. I also don't totally trust flash memory yet (if that's what an SSD uses). So, the real me agrees with you 100%.

Also, I'm doing raid 5 with 4 1TB drives (for editing After Effects files in Premiere and Canon 5d Mark II DSLR footage) and trying to decide between

this:

http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-/tr4utplusb.html

or this:

Areca ARC-1680iX-12

Any advice on what has better performance?  If it's similar in speed I'll probably go with the Sans Digital for portability.

Thanks for any insight!!!

What do you think about the new Areca 6Gb/s 1880 series RAID cards?

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/1880.htm

On a side I wonder how a couple Vertex 3's would compare with Velociraptors on these cards?

Onboard motherboard 6Gb/s controllers have been garbage to date ie. Marvell.  I would expect these Areca cards to make the 6Gb/s drives shine.

C300 benchmarks on and off 1880ix

Gary

This is pretty much the same place I'm in.  I'm getting 150mb/s off a $150 usb3 wd external 7200 drive now!  Yay USB3!   I'm going to start by trying raid 5 onboard and see if it plays my dslr files well.  That's all I'm really wanting is smooth playback.  The usb3 drive plays them almost perfectly but there's a slight lag which I think could improve with raid.

Well without the Quadro 4000 the a 2 drive raid 0 internal is only going to improve those so much.  Spreading the files out among 3 drives wont speed up your export times on a MAC anymore than the Raid 0. The Raid 0 on OSX actually performs better than it does on the PC because of HFS+ so you would get the best times without the Quadro with your Media, cache, and export times on that. Beyond that the Quadro 4000 will be your best improvement for export times with the Mac Pro.

Eric

ADK

Well when I did our testing here the export time on the same project went from 2 hours to 40 minutes with the Quadro 4000 card. You definitely want to get the 2 drives especially if you get the Quadro since the single drive would slow the performance down that you gain from the Quadro. However splitting the drives wont help you. A 2 drive raid 0 for media will give you the best performance you are going to get with that codec on a MAC

Eric

ADK

It will increase like that for Premiere and Media Encoder. However AE will not be show improvement from the Quadro. If that green screen work was done in AE then only the drives would give you a performance increase.

Eric

ADK

Threading and RAM is what decides performance for AE.

Normally we sell the WD 64 meg cache drives on the MAC and they perform very well in raid 0.

Eric

ADK

Hi and many thanks to everybody: this forum is a wealth of informations.

I need precisions about RAID configuration though.

My future station will have an SSD for OS and programs and 12 Samsung Spinpoint  F3 HDD (Areca 1880-ix-12 controller) for working with Premiere.

What is the best performance/reliability for the 12 drives:

     1) 11 RAID 3 + 1 Hotspare

     2) RAID 30 (2x6 RAID 3 layer)

     3) Other?

Thank you for your suggestions.

Thank you, I will go for 6x2 RAID 30. One more question: is a stripe size of 128 KB significant in performance improvement?

May I ask for a recommendation? I've lurked quite a bit in the forum, learning as much as I can about building my own system.

I've got everything pretty much figured out and built, except the optimal disk configuation. I have an unusual mix of different drives to work with, and I'm stumped on the ideal setup. I could use some of these drives elsewhere if they're not needed, but this system has first priority for whatever use/configuration might make it most effective.

Here's what I have:

Crucial C300 128GB SATA III SSD - OS, programs

4x1TB Spinpoint F3 HDDs - recently purchased, and I plan to do onboard RAID 0 (wish I could afford a controller card)

1TB Caviar Black SATA III HDD

Kingston V100 128GB SSD

OCZ Revodrive 120GB PCIe SSD

4x1TB Deskstar HDD RAID 5 external box - backups

I'm thinking I might change the C drive to the OCZ since it's the fastest. Additionally, I have a 1500VA UPS.

Please let me know if you need any other information. Thank you!

Dank u wel, Harm!

May I ask for your definition of "diligent" backups? Once a day, every few hours of editing, or...?

On a side note, the über-geek in me wants to understand which drive would optimal for each task. I know this thread is only for general guidelines, though -- is there another thread which discusses relative advantages of individual disc performance characteristics, specific performance interpretation, and optimal editing task assignment...<snip>

Thanks again!!

EDIT: I'll create a separate thread regarding drive performance questions/guidelines

Hi Harm,

One quick question based on the 'Guidelines for Disk Usage' please...

Is Pagefile the same as Scratch Disks?

Thanks!

Ted

Ok... cool - but I don't see Scratch Disks listed on the sheet for Guidelines for Disk Usage... so are they a part of one of the categories listed? Where should they go for a 2 or 3 disk setup?

Thanks!

Ted

Hi Harm

What do you think about post# 227 ?

Many thanks !

wonderdude wrote:

 

Dank u wel, Harm!

 

May I ask for your definition of "diligent" backups? Once a day, every few hours of editing, or...?

 

 

On a side note, the über-geek in me wants to understand which drive would optimal for each task. I know this thread is only for general guidelines, though -- is there another thread which discusses relative advantages of individual disc performance characteristics, specific performance interpretation, and optimal editing task assignment...<snip>

 

Thanks again!!

 

 

EDIT: I'll create a separate thread regarding drive performance questions/guidelines

Depending on how important your work is to you, once a day may be enough. Personally, I would setup something automated that protects against forms of data degradation and corruption. With a little knowledge or cash (and either can be substituted for the other), one can setup a NAS device to perform hourly snapshots. Something like Solaris 11, OpenIndiana or Nexenta operating systems would be a good place to start.

Sure are, roctagon. This should answer all your questions: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20001215021440138

General question for all the gurus on the forum.  Been reading and studying at great length to understand how to optimize my setup and am still not getting the performance that my system should produce.  My configuration is:

Mac OSX 10.6.7

3.2Ghz Intel i7

24Gb 1600MHz DDR3 RAM

Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 1GB RAM

Disk Setup:

64GB SSD: OS and Applications

2 Disk TB G-RAID (RAID ) via eSATA: Video Files and Premiere Pro projects

1TB 7200rpm SATA: Previews, Media Cache, Exports

Scrubbing just one layer of 1920x1080 .mov video from my DSLR is choppy and sluggish and forget about multiple layers with effects.  I see my performance then watch all the adobe tutorials of multiple streams of RED footage running and scrubbing smoothly and I get frustrated.  Exports are also slow and crash often.

I cannot do the PP Benchmark because I'm on a Mac but I've used MMBench disk monitoring software will playing video to check transfer speeds and I'm only getting an average of 50mb/s via eSATA when G-RAID's literature guarantees 200mb/s!  Does anybody know what I'm doing wrong or where the bottleneck is??

I'm thinking of adding another 2TB 2 Disk RAID 0 to bring my system to a 4 disk system.  Would this make a big difference?

Also, the G-RAID is currently my main disk with pictures, AI files, documents, etc on it along with the Source Media. (I do back up religiously with Time Machine).  I have 622GB used of the 2TB G-RAID.  Does this G-RAID need to be SOLELY dedicated to Source Media to transfer data fast?

Thanks for all the info on the forum and hopefully someone can enlighten me!