Comments

MarkHolmes wrote on 6/11/2009, 11:56 AM
Lars - That's great - whats the rest of your system like? Mobo? Processor? Memory? How is the raid configured? External or internal?

The reason I ask: Many here have had problems getting full frame playback, myself included, and knowing what works for others can get us a step closer to success.

Thanks, Lars.
LarsHD wrote on 6/11/2009, 12:45 PM
Asus P5KR mobo
8 gb ram
Vista 64 and Windows 32 (two separate OS drives)
2 VelociRaptors in Raid-0 (300 GB drives = 600 GB)
Q 6600 CPU
Nvideo GeForce 8800 GTS 512

Befor the VelociRaptors ( 10000 rpm ) I tried both the WD Green 7200 rpms and the older 10000 rpm Raptors.

Running HD Tach I see considerably improved performance. Not a little, perhaps 2-3 times better performance depending on what you measure. They really *do* make a difference.

1920x1080 footage uncompressed AVI runs at fill frame rate without a problem.

1280x720 footage uncompressed AVI runs *two* streams (dissolves etc) with full frame rate.

1920x1080 footage does not "quite" run two streams during a dissolve - frama rate goes down a little during a dissolve. thats why I will still need a good Cineform/MXF workflow. If I want 1920x1080 for editing.

1920x1080 Cineform or MXF runs two streams during a dissolve without any problem.

Scrubbing back and forth 1920x1080 goves a very direct real physical feel and the overal resonsivness and feel got better after install these animals...

Also, they are really silent and thats nice too.

They are a bit unusual. 2.5 drives about twice as thick as a laptop drive and built into a full size cooling thing so it fits in a desktop PC in a normal slot.


Lars

MarkHolmes wrote on 6/11/2009, 3:05 PM
Thanks Lars; that's really helpful.

One other question - how did you set up your RAID? Is it an external enclosure or is it set up inside your case, or something else?
farss wrote on 6/11/2009, 3:43 PM
Based on tests done outside the video world they seem pretty unreliable. I guess if you had plenty of money then the 15K SAS drives would be the way to go.
Bob.
srode wrote on 6/11/2009, 6:17 PM
Raid 10 4 WD Caviar Blacks and you will get similar performance - plus redundancy which will be better reliability than any single disc when coupled with a RAID card and Battery BU. RAID 0 is not as reliable but 10 is - just need twice the number of drives. Raid 5 is also very reliable but slower than 10.
MarkHolmes wrote on 6/12/2009, 12:37 AM
srode - how would you recommend going about building that RAID 10? External? Internal? Dedicated RAID card, and if so, what kind? Or just mboard RAID? What is your system?
LarsHD wrote on 6/12/2009, 2:36 AM
Since the disk space isn't so big (600gb) I only use my raid-0 setup on the mobo for streaming. Just to get faster streaming. All my footage otherwise is stored on other drives. So if the Velociraptor fails it isn't a big deal since I don't lose any data.

But they are silent. And with CIneform or MXF they stream 1920x1080 footage reliably during dissolves. And 1920x1080 uncompressed AVI and thats good.

I'm sure Bob and others are aware of better and faster and more reliable solutions - however this was quick, it took me 20 minutes to put them in place.

They didn't cost too much and I've working with them for a day now and the bottom line for me is that it is a big difference from what I had.

Lars
srode wrote on 6/12/2009, 4:07 AM

'srode - how would you recommend going about building that RAID 10? External? Internal? Dedicated RAID card, and if so, what kind? Or just mboard RAID? What is your system? "

I have a 3ware 9650SE RAID card - you can find them on Ebay for a bit over $200 used - or newegg new for about 320 - it's one of the easiest raid cards to use and very fast. A battery back up is another 100 - clips on to the RAID card. You need a PCIE 4x slot to plug it into on the board. With 4 Caviar Blacks 1TB each in raid 10 you would have almost 2TB of drive space.

Another option is to put the drives on the motherboard and use Intel matrix raid - not quited as secure because some problems with the OS can cause issues - I have never had any issues with it though. The motherboard I use is Gigabyte EP45 DQ6 - which has an ICH10R.

I use the ICH10R for a RAID5 Array that is where I store most of my data. On the 3 ware card I have the OS on a 200GB partition and another 1.2 TB partition for additional storage - all on 4 640GB WD Caviars in RAID10. It's all internal to the PC - which has 9 HDDS - the aditional one is a 1TB Caviar Black with I use to BU information periodically.

All this fits into a midsized ATX case easily. The case is a Gigabye Poseydon with 2 Athena back plane sets holding 3 drives each- 3 in the dirve bay that came with the case and still room for my Bluray burner and a floppy drive - this leaves an open bay for another drive it I wanted one for something else. Additional information on the system: Q6700 overclocked to 3.33 GHZ, 8GB RAM, Corsair 620W power supply.

Net, I have 3 copies of my data - one on the 3ware, 1, on the single drive, and 1 on the RAID5 Array. With the OS on the raid 10 it's boots in about half the time of a single drive and applications start and run smoother too.

Let me know if you have more questions on the system/how to set one up.
SuperG wrote on 6/12/2009, 9:31 AM
I've been using a 10K vr for about two years. A nice speed-up with going the whole SCSI thing.

No raid though. I only use it for the current project I'm working on. I don't use it for long term storage,

Sure wish they could come up with a 15K SATA drive.
jwcarney wrote on 6/12/2009, 10:20 AM
3ware and areca both make good 8 port cards that support raid 50 (Raid 0 ontop of dual Raid 5). Using those Velociraptors you would get almot 2 terabytes of high performance storage.
willlisub wrote on 6/14/2009, 9:27 AM
I have set up and used about 8 - 3ware and Areca 8 port pci-x and pci-e raid 5 systems and 1 -16 port system.

Some for me, some for others. My base assessment is:

3 Ware better tech support and can reach someone to talk with immediately. I learned raid 5 on the 3Ware systems, so more need to call and learn.
Areca, pretty much email only. I haven't used there tech support much, so can't really say, but the one time it took a while to hear back. Like in days not hours.

Speed. I find the Areca to be faster on the reads and writes. I'd pick the Areca for video editing over the 3 Ware. I'd pick the 3Ware for support for a server app.

Reliability. Both A + with modern versions of their cards. Had some issues with faulty drive signals when the drives were OK on some 3Ware cards years ago with IDE drives. Doesn't seem to be an issue with SATA drives.

I generally use 500GB SATA drives with 5-8 in raid 5 configs. Have a couple set up with 5 - 1TB drives, but haven't done any video editing on those. One of my areca setups, runs 7 days a week and serves as a server but also with occasional vegas editing 8.1c. Have always used 10k drives on SCSI and 7200RPM on SATA and IDE.

I'm going to be doing some editing, similar to what Lars is using his 10k drives for. When I get some experience with the Cineform files and uncompressed, I'll let you know. I currently have a 6 drive setup in one of my machines on a Areca 8 port pci-3 card running on an Intel q6600.

I'll probably try both 1080p as well as 720p I'm finding my 5D files render out way faster in 720p and most people don't appreciate or see the difference on their sets. Whole other conversation there. Long processing and rendering times are getting to me.

Another thing, when you back up from these raid systems to another raid, it's very fast. I have tried inexpensive raid cards with port mulitpliers and the back up is fast. Now, I just use external e-sata drives off the motherboard and stripe two 1tb drives in raid 0. Figure between raid 5 and raid 0, I'm semi safe with two copies. In about 5 years of doing this, I've had some raid drives fail, but never lost any data. It's always nerve racking while you rebuild a raid 5, but with a backup, not so nerve racking. For DYI's, if you pay attention, 2x1TB 7200rpm drives on sale around 175-190 with $60 bucks for external e-sata case and cables/brackets for 2 drives. About $240 for 2TB's external back up or 2 drive raid 0. Not bad.




LarsHD wrote on 6/14/2009, 10:26 AM
Hi Willie

Can you play two streams simultaneously of 1920x1080 footage with your setup? Or play 1920x1080 at full frame rate, go through a 3 second dissolve to another video clip and maintain full frame rate all through?


best,
Lars
willlisub wrote on 6/14/2009, 1:14 PM
I'm sorry I don't have much time for testing nor is my editing system set up with my fastest raid. I do have vegas 8.1c on my server with an old crappy video card and that has my fastest raid. Hopefully, I'll have time to get a faster raid on the edit machine, or change graphic cards and put the intensity card in the server. My editor is just using 2 striped 7200 rpm drives and a test Raid card that sucked and I pulled it out. It has a middle of the road graphics card and used to overclocked to 3.2, but now running at 2.4 because of some issues that are probably from having too many software programs and codecs in it. No time to rebuild right now.

My server has 6- 500GB SATA Seagate drives raid 5, (about 80% full right now) an old graphics card, and Vegas 8.1c. I did clear a 500GB partition, so at least it's not cluttered for a video test.
Preview set to 1/2 size and preview mode on my editing monitor with no scaling allowed:
3 cineform clips 1920x1080p on 3 video tracks and they playback at 29.97 in a 1920x1080P time line at 29.77 as clips with no fx but scaling on 2 tracks. I have the bottom one full screen and the 2nd and 3rd ones scaled as picture in picture. They didn't play back at full frame best quality at 29.97 fps.

20 seconds transitions between the two clips played ok and when I did a transition between two clips on bottom track and had the two scaled pics on two more tracks, it took a quick hit to 26+ fps for the transition time. Dropping the single audio track was good for 1 fps. Then it was 27_ fps.

When having 3 audio tracks, the frame rate dropped a tad. These numbers were with 2 audio tracks disabled.

I'll try some uncompressed files later.

OT... I used to set up some systems with raid 0, 8 -10k SCSI drives. We were able to do 4 tracks of realtime uncompressed SD Video and 4 alpha channels with a fair amount of realtime effects. Blurs, scales, color correction, etc.....

Company went under and product was discontinued (844/X Media 100). I kept supporting the product for a while and did some storage work. I did one system with ide drives 7200 that worked converting 8 drives to scsi then running two scsi channels.

When trying the same thing with 8 sata drives in stripped 0, I got higher speed ratings on reads and writes then I did on the 8 10k scsi drives in raid 0.

However, I could only do 4 Realtime uncompressed SD tracks and 2 alpha channels. Audio didn't really matter as we had those on different mechanisms.

I think the difference was the seek times on the 8 SATA or IDE drives we tested with. We dropped a few frames with 4 Video channels and 3 or 4 Alpha channels.

I later went to 5 drives each on the 7200 RPM IDE drives (2x5 for 10) with each 5 drive set converted to SCSI, then we could run the 4 Vid and 4 alpha channels together. Didn't make any sense unless the SCSI protocol has quicker access calls.

Gave up after that, but have always kept in the back of tmind that raw through put is good, but access time is also needed for multi track playback. It's always good to have audio on separate tracks, but in todays world our video and audio are many times in the same file.

Anyway, back to Vegas. I'm up to my neck in both work and home stuff so not much time for reconfiguring or testing, but will try to get a properly set up system as I'm going to have to start doing lots of editing soon on some projects.

Would like to upgrade to a new i7 processor and maybe Vegas V9, but am too swamped to take chances and make changes right now.