Hard Drive Question - Liquid Chrome & MC 2.7
 

Can anyone suggest a good external hard drive configuration for a Liquid Chrome Xe / MC Soft 2.7 system: (xw8400 3.0Ghz DC 2P - xena Lhe - ati fire gl v7300) I'm trying to find out if these applications work better with multiple striped drives or in some kind of RAID configuration for multi-layered HDV / HD.

Can a SATA raid be constructed by daisey chaining eSATA drives (like they used to do with the old Avid 9gigs)? Any enlightenment for this technically challenged person would be appreciated. (I used an Avid Unity disk array for years and never really understood how it worked :)

Thanks.

eSATA works pretty well
 

Jon,

I was just wondering the same thing about the eSATA raid. I just bought a 300Gb Seagate eSATA drive for $100. And it included a PCI drive controller that has 2 eSATA ports. So, I might get a 2nd drive to test it all out both as a raid 0.

So, far with the single eSATA I have been able to edit in Avid Xpress and Avid Liquid 720p HDV flawlessly. I also imported an uncompressed 720p into Liquid and it played fine. On the Xpress side I was able to edit 720p at DNX HD 220 with no problem.

Cheers

David,

Thanks for the info. I am looking at those same Seagate drives...perhaps I should just start with one and see what happens. Someone on the avid forum said that using an eSATA controller will crash an MC Soft 2.7 system because the card is not certified (I'm planning on running Liquid Chrome and MC Soft 2.7 side by side on the same workstation)...do you know anything about this?

Jon,

I disagree with the guy from the Avid forum. I'm editing a freelance project on Media Composer v. 2.5.3 at a facility that mixes all kinds of non-certified drives controllers including a fiber channel raid controller from I believe G-Raid. I can't imagine that 2.7 would be any different.

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-SPEED.cfm

Avid stopped being proprietary with industry standard drive/drive controllers a long time ago.

Xpress/Media Composer just don't support 3rd party video I/O options from Aja and Black Magic. So, Media Composer will not work with the Chrome XE hardware. Everything else related to PC/MAC architecture is compatible. Only Liquid 7.2 Chrome Xe works with Aja Xena.

I currently have both Xpress and Liquid and mainly because I own a JVC HD100a and Liquid supports 24p from that camera but Xpress doesn't.

I have had good success moving from Xpress to Liquid with sequences but it is a slow process.

FYI, I did a test late last night with 1080/24 and 1080/60 footage on Liquid last night with the single Seagate and the footage choked a little. So, 720p might be the edit ceiling without a raid on Liquid. (Keep in mind I don't have Liquid Chrome with a Xena card)

Anyway, I think the Avid certified hardware message has been way overblown.

Thanks for your insight....here's that thread from the Avid forum. This guy says a Seagate controller will cause a stop error in 2.7 on both a Dell and HP:

http://www.avid.com/exchange/forums/thread/245293.aspx

I bet he didn't load up the controller software that allows the controller to be seen by the bios on boot up. (Software somes with the drive). However, he said that he turns it on after boot up which works because the eSATA drives are plug and play. So, he can see the drive after boot up.

You should give it a whirl.

Raid 1+0
 

I've been researching this and it looks like a 4 disc RAID 10 configuration will be the best for what I need: increased performance and full redundancy - a bit pricey per gig though :( Now I just have to figure out how to create a RAID 10 in Windows XP.....

Man you're really going after it. Keep us up to date as to how things work out. You're in an area beyond any meager IT knowledge I have.

Good Luck.

I can confirm that stop error on a HPXW8200 with the Seagate controller

Everthing installs fine (and works) until you reboot PC. On next boot you will get a stop error.

I simply replaced the controller with a 4 port eSata controller I had lying around.

Are you talking about an external media drive that will support uncompressed caputres or are you talking about an external media drive scenario which will be for compressed formats?

S.

Maybe I should just fill everyone in on my experience with eSATA and SATA and Avid. As mentioned above I'm running 2 x Seagate 500G in a RAID 0 configuration on an XW8200 (dual 3.06G Xeon) with Avid Xpress Studio HD - these are SATA 2 drives set up that way. Most of the material on these drives is DV based and these drives are fine for that. I think 2 drives in RAID 0 is not enough for uncompressed on the Avid - it will work but when the drives start to get full you will experience audio underruns and dropped frames.

However I have two other setups running SATA - one an eSATA on an older Meridien Elite - this is SATA1 in a RAID0 config 4 x 250G drives. This supports uncompressed quite well on an older W8000. The other system is an E7505 board (same as XW8000) with 2 x 2.6GHz procs set with an internal SATA RAID0 array 4 x 150Gig drives (SATA1). This system plays and records uncompressed easily (that's Avid uncompressed) and has been running smoothly for nearly 3 years.