HD Capture: What drives to buy
by Bill Crocker
on
Jun 19, 2008 at 8:10:06 pm
Hi everyone,
I am looking for an affordable/reliable external hard drive array to do HD work (26 part series, 720p23.98). I have looked at Caldigit, G-Tech and Sonnet drive solutions and it would seem that the Sonnet Fussion 5TB arrays have the best size to dollar ratio. I was just wonder what everyone else is using? Does anyone have any experience with the Sonnet's?
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy by Bob Zelin on Jun 19, 2008 at 10:42:37 pm
these are all great solutions. Dulce Systems, Maxx Digital, GMax, and others that you see advertising on Creative Cow, are all excellent solutions, and are all FAST (and almost all are RAID 5 and/or RAID 6). They all work, they are all good companies. What's the best bang for the buck - check the prices on various mail order sites. We are SO lucky that today, there are few poor choices (except Lacie).
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy: FINAL by Bill Crocker on Jul 16, 2008 at 8:56:18 pm
Just to let everyone know what I went with and why:
I picked the Sonnet Fusion D550P 5TB arrays(2) and the Tempo E4P.
The 26 part show was shot DVCProHD 1080i60 and will be delivered and mastered in SD only (not my call). We are posting the show DVCProHD 1080i60 and doing the conversion to letterboxed SD at the end (this way, when they want to do HD eventually, it will already be done).
Since the footage is only 14.5MB/sec, we left the drives JBOD for capture so we could put 3 to 4 episodes per disc.
This will also help with archiving as we only need to replace a single drive rather than all of them (if they were RAIDed).
Replacing all the drives for higher end HD work in the future will be easy.
Total cost for 10TB storage was around $5200 CAD.
This is the first series I have done in HD (we did the same show last year in SD) so I hope I made the right choice. I guess I'll know in a few weeks.
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy: RANT by Bob Zelin on Jul 16, 2008 at 11:36:29 pm
Bill -
you are OUT OF YOUR MIND. You were advised on countless different solutions, and you chose a RAID 0 solution.
This is what will happen (possibly).
You are using the Sonnet E4P SATA host controller card. This card is RAID 0, not RAID 5. It will work wonderfully, and if you are lucky - IF YOU ARE LUCKY, it will keep working. But if one drive fails, you will lose ALL OF YOUR MEDIA. This is why Sonnet, Cal Digit, Dulce, Maxx Digital, G-Tech, and everyone else has switched over to RAID 5 - becuase they were sick and tired of getting phone calls saying "my RAID failed, and now I can't see any of my media".
Sonnet is an excellent company, and I have used countless E4P cards from Sonnet. BUT THEY FAIL. Why did you make this decision - I will tell you why - because it costs LESS MONEY than the Sonnet RAID 5 solution that uses the ATTO R380 card (and costs more money).
You my friend, are playing Russian Roulette. Your drives will work wonderfully at the beginnning, but you have about a 20% chance of LOSING all of your video media, becuase you are operating at RAID 0.
You go ahead and do what you want. I use tons of Sonnet and Cal Digit hardware, and have extensive experience with the E4P, and the Cal Digit Fasta 4E. I know exactly what happens. This is why BOTH COMPANIES (and everyone else) is selling RAID 5 arrays today. The Silicon Image 3124 chipset (the chipset on your Sonnet E4P) may punish you. You do what you want. But you have been warned - and I absolutely will say I TOLD YOU SO.
Sonnet is an EXCELLENT manufacturer - choose their RAID 5 product if you want to have no failures, not the E4P.
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy: RANT by Ramona Howard on Jul 17, 2008 at 12:10:32 am
WOW Bob, Harsher than me.
Look guys, Raid 0 works great and is a great solution if you need a quick and dirty playout. Something that you can re-create or move over easily. The benefit is that there is no rebuild time when you do have a drive failure(and you will have a drive failure). It is used in workflows where, clips can be moved over faster than it would take to re-build the Raid5 array.
Raid5 will cost you a bit more but honestly small shops (and yes we do even have a few of those) can't afford to have a temp device so they double up and pack drives with stuff that (Oh I gotta make sure this gets archived). Guess what Raid0, it's all gone, Raid5 there is a level of protection.
By the way we have large shops running in both modes, just depends on what part of the workflow the Rave is being used for.
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy: RANT by Bill Crocker on Jul 17, 2008 at 2:08:47 am
Yikes I got blasted.
Firstly, everyone did speak of the Caldigit at RAID5, yes I agree. My original post did specifically ask for information on the Sonnet system as that was what I was looking at and Bob did mention that it was in the list of good systems but did offer no other information on it and no one else did either.
Bob - "these are all great solutions. Dulce Systems, Maxx Digital, GMax, and others that you see advertising on Creative Cow, are all excellent solutions, and are all FAST (and almost all are RAID 5 and/or RAID 6). They all work, they are all good companies. What's the best bang for the buck - check the prices on various mail order sites. We are SO lucky that today, there are few poor choices (except Lacie)."
It is good to know now that the E4P's do fail so I will be looking out for that now. My employer was looking at putting the show on 2TB LaCie drives and I knew where that was headed. Anyways, I am not at RAID0 but rather JBOD (which is just as volatile I know). If I had gone RAID5 I would be left with 7TB of space and that may not be enough based on last years hours times this years data rate. I understand the risks of RAID0 all too well which is why I decided to go JBOD rather than RAID0. 1TB of space lost is far better than 5TB.
Crazy, perhaps. Russian Roulette, yes. I am not saying this is the best decision I could have made (from Bob's rant apparently not) but I am stuck here now. Bob, Ramona, if I was to ask what card you would have chosen that would give reliable RAID5 for the Sonnet Fusions would you be able to point me in the right direction?
I think I'll head off now and re-attach my severed head...
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy: RANT by Ramona Howard on Jul 17, 2008 at 4:02:14 am
Bill,
Sorry for the be-heading, Just trying to stress the importance to maybe those who are also listening :)
Data amounts have certainly become larger now with the ability to do it at cost effective prices, which means the pain has also increased when something goes bad. Those who do not plan for this WILL get burned.
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy: RANT by Bill Crocker on Jul 17, 2008 at 4:44:47 am
Agreed, which is why I'll never buy another LaCie drive.
I'd love to throw $ out the window and make the best choice but I was lucky to get what I did given my situation. My solution is probably not the best one to be posted here, especially with the amount of traffic on the Cow.
In a perfect world I would have needed 2 D800 6TB systems running RAID5 to hold all my data which would be around $9500 or so. I was barely able to get the $5200 I needed for the 5TB D500's. My only other option was to buy a whack of 750gig drives for my current 3-Ware Sidecar but then I would be looking at a bunch of drive swaps just to work.
At least the D500's will do RAID10 so when this show is finished I can at least mirror all of our corporate work that will be stored on them, which at best is 10bit uncompressed SD (after I pull and shelve the show drives).
I guess my biggest fault here is not qualifying what my full situation was/would be in my opening post, and for that I appologize.
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy by Raymond Singer on Jun 25, 2008 at 5:13:13 pm
I want to get in on this with a BIG VOTE for CalDigit's HDPro. I've been a fan of the company for years but the HDPro is truly amazing. Speed [oh my, this drive is fast]. Dependability. Better [and far less expensive] than fibre. Expandable. Rock-solid 24/7 support. What else do you need? I used the HDPro for a media-heavy HBO doc and it just plain worked - day in and day out. Talk about feeling confident and secure! Check it out.
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy by raymond Singer on Jun 25, 2008 at 9:40:41 pm
HBO is doing a 3 chapter, 3 hour doc on Alzheimer's Disease. Bill Couturié is directing one of the three chapters. I worked on the first few stories of his chapter. Bill, and the project, are now up in SF.
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy by Alan Bell on Jun 25, 2008 at 10:49:55 pm
I have two HDPro towers each with 2TB at raid level five then striped at raid 0 in software. They work like a charm. I'm currently cutting a feature for Fox Searchlight on this system.
In the past I used these same drives set up as raid zero to finish a feature for fox atomic at 2K resoultion.
I cannot say enough good things about Caldigit.
Alan Bell
Alan Bell
---------------
Discreet Combustion Co-Host
LA Combustion Users Group Co-Host
Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy by Jon Schilling on Jun 26, 2008 at 12:02:51 am
FYI for those that might want to know. Alan is using our eLane-2e 4 lane 2 port card to connect 2 HDPro's to one workstation utilizing only 1 PCIe slot.
You could also do a RAID 50 this way.
Our users are the best!
Jon Schilling | Sales Manager
CalDigit Inc.
Storage Solutions that work for un-compressed SD & HD, Photography & Audio
www.caldigit.com
Tel: 714-572-9889 X234
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e-mail: jons@caldigit.com
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Re: HD Capture: What drives to buy by John Fishback on Jul 2, 2008 at 2:28:27 pm
We've just ordered a 6TB RAID based around the new ATTO RAID card. The enclosure holds 9 drives (we're using 8 drives). It will operate in RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 10, 40, 50*, and JBOD. See the following links:
