DAT Optics external RAID system

My manager and I have been in the market for a fast external RAID for my editing system for a while. I have survived up until now using a small internal RAID in my Mac Pro 3 Ghz Dual Quad. It is made up of only three 500GB drives as the first bay is used for my Macintosh HD. It's RAID 0 which is pretty scary, I have been copying all of my EX1 HD media to a second and third location as a 'backup'.

Obviously, the system is ripe for speed improvements and a faster more useful backup solution. There are some big name options we looked into, but Tim had put an E-SATA system together earlier for my old Dual G4 system from a company named DAT Optics, and it worked very well, even though it is relatively not known to our industry. The reason I'm writing is to let all of you know that our new system is clocking faster than some of the top name systems that cost much more than we paid for our system!

We used the AJA software to clock the speed of the system. Friday we took some of my longest clips recorded to SxS media in 1920x1080p30 and upconverted them to ProRess422 and were able to stack eight tracks scaling each track so they all fit in boxes inside the sequence, and we could not get my system to need a render - and everything played without delays or chugs. That not being enough - we were pretty excited - we took the original clips and upconverted them to uncompressed 10 bit video clips. A sliver over 1 gigabyte worth of video turned into 33 gigabytes of uncompressed video. We were able to drop them into a uncompressed 10 bit sequence and stack three tracks before we got the red render line. In this test, we also took each of the two 48k audio tracks. We were able to go four tracks when we selected Unlimited RT in the sequence playback property.

It was stunning and exciting - AND my eight cores were not even working at all! The funny thing is that we had more than enough speed to deliver the three uncompressed tracks, but just under the speed needed to deliver the fourth track!

I know these guys don't advertise here, so I won't drop a link, but if you're interested in stunning speed and reliability for a fraction of the typical cost, you should really consider looking into DAT Optics. It's a hardware RAID that utilizes a controller card that basically extends the lanes out to the hardware boxes, (we have two boxes that each house eight 1 terabyte drives). If anyone out there is interested, I can post an update as I begin to move down this new road of less compressed video editing on this system.

-s

Stephen May
Keystone Media Productions
Freelance Videographer