Need RAID advice for working with Kona 2
by Lars Bunch
on
Feb 28, 2006 at 7:21:21 pm
Hi,
I am looking into setting up an HD edit suite with a Kona 2 card. This will be in a small facility and the projects we get are extremely varied. I want to make sure I get enough RAID capacity and speed from the start rather than trying to cheap it out and discovering I need more.
I am undecided whether to go with a Huge Systems 4105, a 4110 or 4210.
Looking at the AJA data rate calculator, it looks like if I had to digitize 1920x1080i 10Bit at 59.94fps, I would need a RAID that could handle 331.44 Mbytes per second. Of the above, it looks like only the 4210 can handle this. However the 4210 is about $4000 more than I had hoped to spend.
In what situations would I have to digitize at 59.94fps?
I suppose the question, in a nutshell is this; in most situations, how often would I be likely to need to read or write to a disk at more than 200 Mbytes per second (Huge 4110) or 300 Mbytes per second (4105)? Should I bite the bullet and get the 4210 because I will often need that level of speed?
Re: Need RAID advice for working with Kona 2 by JeremyG on Feb 28, 2006 at 8:08:52 pm
Are you going to be working uncompressed 1080i hd at all? If so the 4210 is where you need to be. It's pricey, but it's worth it. I have a 4105 and I wish I had more capacity, but at the same time I travel a bit and the 4105 is very travel friendly. I don't think you will ever do 10 bit uncompressed 60p. You will more likely be doing DVCPRO HD 1080i or some format of HDV or 720p24 or 720p60. The main reason I went with Huge is for their reliability alone. It's not often that I need the blazing speed (although some jobs I do), but just to have the raid 3 redundancy and Huge's tech support is a real sleep saver. You'll find that the 'extra' $4,000 was well spent.
Re: Need RAID advice for working with Kona 2 by Bob Zelin on Mar 1, 2006 at 3:49:25 am
Lars - as everyone is telling you, the HUGE 4210 is the best selection if you want to do uncompressed HD. If you can afford a Sony HD VTR, then you
can afford this drive array. However, if you are going HDV, P2, DVCProHD, etc., then you can easily get away with SATA drives or Firewire 800, for about 1/10 th the price. I have found that most people are more than happy with DVCProHD, and the SATA drives are super reliable.
Re: Need RAID advice for working with Kona 2 by David Battistella on Mar 1, 2006 at 2:24:16 pm
One other consideration.
Do you need to protect your storage? My theory is that if I am going with a large array then I need to be running that storage in protected mode so that I can be covered in case of drive failure.
So I have a raid with 4tb online and if a drive gos down I do not loose the data. So how importatn is your data? Think worst case scenario.
Then there is SATA, which is cheap but unprotected. So do you want to have ten jobs on an unprotected storage raid 0 device. Riad 3 5 or 50 should be a consideration in your decision. If I loose a 400 GIG firewire job with one job on it that is one thing. If I loose 2 terabytes, that is another.
Drives fail. Computers fail. Monitors die. tapes get headclogs. It will happen to you. It happens at one time or antoher. Until you have lost everything on a drive or a machie you never quite know the sting.
If you go with SATA you might want to start small and build, but you have to max out the stripe to get the speed you want.
Don't forget RT in FCP is very dependant onthe speed of your drives as well.
Re: Need RAID advice for working with Kona 2 by Ramona Howard on Mar 2, 2006 at 12:16:14 am
David,
you comment:
Then there is SATA, which is cheap but unprotected.
Just want to clarify this as is not entirely accurate. The Kona card can be utilized on other platforms and products other than the Mac and that do offer RAID protection using SATA.
We have been offering this(SATA) for well over a year along with SCSI and Fiber for much longer and utilizing Konas, Xenas and OEM boards while running in studios worldwide in both RAID 0 and RAID 5. SATA is stable, don't be mislead it isn't.
Although our particular application is agnostic as to if it's a Kona, Xena or AJA OEM card and I do realize that most on this forum are referring to the Mac side, just though that I should interject. SATA is agnostic to the OS but does not offer the same issues on each OS and where MAC may be a bit behind the gun on this we(Linux) are not.
SATA has proven an economical way to get studios into 444 with RAID protection, where other products have failed. I can say that we were unable to achieve RAID protection on FIBER(16 drives) for Sin City, however we can with SATA (24 drives) and for far less dollars.
SATA is economical and must be utilize in a smart way (it has it's place) but can hold it's own with it's SCSI and Fiber counterparts in the right workflow.
Cheers,
Ramona
www.spectsoft.com
RaveHD - The first uncompressed VTR/DDR solution to open it's source code.
