HDOne w/MacBook Pro
by Doug Cooper
on
Jun 6, 2008 at 10:14:50 pm
I just got off the phone with Jason over at Caldigit, who was very helpful in walking me through the various produce offerings for storage. I'm considering the purchase of an HDOne with 2-4tb of storage to attached to a recent model MACBOOK PRO 17" (2.6GHZ, 4GB RAM). My intentions are to use it for SD/HD editing in FCP, and also for doing work in Apple color on uncompressed 10-bit 444 material up to 2K film resolutions.
I'd love to hear from any users out there abuot their experiences using this kind of performance storage on a MACBOOK PRO. Am I insane to do this (do I really need to go to a desktop system?), or is this likely to work well for me?
Re: HDOne w/MacBook Pro by Jon Schilling on Jun 6, 2008 at 11:43:33 pm
Doug,
I've e-mailed a couple of our users whom I know have this card & asked them to chime in. Since the HDOne is a relatively new product, I don't think there are too many users yet that have an eLane-1ex card with it. The majority of people with a eLane-1ex card right now have been using it with a HDPro. The resulting help should however be beneficial to your situation.
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
Fax: 714-572-9881
e-mail: jons@caldigit.com
Skype me: cgijon
msn: mpujon
Re: HDOne w/MacBook Pro by Steve Utaski on Jun 7, 2008 at 3:05:28 pm
I've had an HDPro for several months now and have been thrilled with its performance connected to my Quad Core G5. At the time I bought my HD Pro, I also acquired a eLane-1ex card mostly out of curiosity. This week while in the final stages of an edit, my G5 suddenly WENT DOWN with client in the room. While scrambling to try and figure out how to make our deadline I remembered the eLane-1ex card which I had never even plugged in or attempted to use. Necessity being the mother of invention I gave it a shot--with low expectations since we were editing full 1920x1080 HD. I connected my MacBok Pro and booted my G5 in Target disk mode to access the project file and non video elements. The HDPro showed up on the desktop as planned, and unbelievably, I was editing again within 15 minutes of a catastrophic G5 failure. The MacPro/HDPro combo played the full HD no problem and I was able to finish the job for a very relived client. If you are considering any Caldigit product, I would say you cannot go wrong. From packaging, to product, to support that company has done nothing but impress me... As I said, I bought the eLane-1ex card more as a curiosity than anything else since it's so cheep. Much to my surprise and delight it ended up being the best insurance policy I could have asked for.
Re: HDOne w/MacBook Pro by Jared Picune on Jun 7, 2008 at 12:03:07 am
These new MacBook Pros are incredible machines. Put that in combination with the power of the HDPro or HDOne and you'll never even know that you editing on a laptop.
Setup takes only a minute, install the driver, reboot pop in the express card attached to the HDOne and you are ready to go.
Performance is the best that I've experienced on a laptop. Obviously there are some caveats to working that way, but I find they are few and far between. But having hardware RAID protected storage on a laptop is truly exhilarating.
I still work on a tower at the office, but now I'm able to grab the HDPro through it (nicely of course) in my back seat and work from home on my MacBook Pro when I want. That flexibility is my favorite feature of the HDPro/HDOne, even above the incredible performance. It's also rather quite and stays cool so it works well in a mobile environment for those reasons.
Re: HDOne w/MacBook Pro by Jared Picune on Jun 7, 2008 at 4:20:27 pm
The biggest stuff I work with is ProRes HD footage, which runs like a dream. And a lot of my clients are till using SD.
The express card bus on the MacBook Pro will only allow for 195MB/s, so the HDOne will not be able to run at it's full speed. This is the limitation of the laptop's bus and there is not way to get anything faster on a laptop period. So if your footage is under that speed you are good to go. If you need more throughput you'll have to move to a Mac Pro. Generally 2K files are just over 200MB/s so you might be at the threshold.
Benchmark wise though 195MB/s is what you get, since the HDPro/HDOne completely saturates the MacBook Pro's bus. On a chart it's like a flat line of pure performance. As far as other editing workflow, stuff feel fluid. Have not tested renders or anything like that. I imagine that the Mac Pro will always be faster, but I don't every feel that I'm sluggish on the laptop.
Re: HDOne w/MacBook Pro by Doug Cooper on Jun 7, 2008 at 5:21:58 pm
Thanks for the response - that's exactly the information I was looking for. 195mb/s should get me real-time playback for pre-rendered uncompressed 10-bit 1080 24p, which is probably as high as I need for now. Once I start doing 2K full-ap, or need more interactive performance, I'll probably need to migrate to a desktop system anyways.
