Laptop editing

[Gabor Lacza]

With a G4 laptop 2 firewire hard drive connected to it on a firewire (800) in RAID you should be able to get pretty fast data transfer ,no??
So you can edit offline with Mac but to do final color correction in 720p than you need to render right ?
Gabor

[Will Thompson]

I'm saying no, definitely DON'T try firewire RAID. It's not meant to be. RAID should be dedicated drives only, and Firewire wasn't mean't to handle RAID anyway. The PCI (or PCI-X) or IDE bus is much better suited to handle RAID.

So, to build on that point - here's an example. Let's say you RAID the external drives with the laptop. Then you move to your next shoot, and plug Drive 1 into where you previously had Drive 0. I'm not sure how robust Macs are in dealing with this stuff, but I'd say if you ever did that, you'd be screwed.

And I'll guarantee you won't get the performance you expect. To do this, you'll need SCSI RAID.

But if you are going to edit offline, ask Frederic, but I'm pretty sure ONE internal drive would be sufficient. He could probably advise you to an offline format.

A Firewire drive might be useful for extra storage, however, but I would recommend against ANY external RAID unless you plan to use SCSI.

[Frederic Lumiere]

In an offline workflow and on a laptop, you can edit using DV and store your source HDV footage on any drive (external if needed).

[Gabor Lacza]

Medea has this G-RAID storage connected to a laptop via firewire 800 and they say you can edit 4 streams of HDV and 3 stream of DVCPRO HD on a laptop...??!!
Is that a good solution ?
Gabor

[Will Thompson]

The G-RAID system is controlled externally with hardware. So, it's like having an external RAID box with a built-in controller. In my opinion, that would be great for editing.

You see, the way these systems are setup, the RAID is transparent to the firewire interface - it's all controlled INSIDE that box. That is a lot different from connecting two firewire drives and letting your PC or MAC control the RAID with software.

[Gabor Lacza]

Exactly...it says you got 75MB/sec transfer rate for HDV or any other editing needs.With my Pentium IV 3.06 GHZ laptop it will be great editing solution for the road.

[Betsy Moore]

So how much would the configuration you guys are now talking about cost, including the Pentium 4 laptop? What do you think the total would come to?

[Gabor Lacza]

Well the G-RAID with 320GB is i think $399 plus a good Pentium IV 3.06 GHZ laptop with 1GB memory is around $2000...
I`ll say for $2500 !
Gabor

[Chris Wright]

i'm looking into the G-Raid 320 GB for video editing on a G4 tower and a powerbook in the future (as posted in my other thread).

The G-Raid is a RAID 0 configuration, right? meaning the 320 GB model actually has two 320 GB drives and keeps one as a backup in case of the other one failing?

If this is the case, can you also set it up in a RAID (1, i think) config to instead have a single 640 GB volume? I suspect this would be similar to the way the LaCie Big Disk is set up?

someone please let me know if what i'm thinking is correct, or fill me in with accurate info. it seems everyone else here already has a better understanding of RAID systems than me :)

thanks

[Mike Gannon]

I've been looking at the G-Raid and I'm pretty sure that the 320 GB is two 160 GBs in a striped array. I don't think you can mirror them for protection. Still, that's alot of storage at a 79mbs sustained rate for the price. Barring some bad reviews or learning I can't do what I need with it, I'll probably be adding it to my system.

[Gabor Lacza]

I actually bought the 160GB G-RAID but i had no chance to hook it up to my laptop and actually try it....but i think in the 160GB version there is 2piece of 80 GB hard drive and i can choose raid-0 or raid-1.If choose Raid-1 than i will get the full 160 Gb of space but if you choose raid-0 you wont get the speed....it is just a thought.

[Phil Wright]

Slightly backwards guys.

Raid 0 is striped meaning the data is shared across both drives for speed and you get all the space.

2 x 80GB drives = 160GB for example.

Raid 1 is mirrored where a duplicate copy of the data is written to both drives in case one goes bad.

2 x 80GB drives = 80 GB

Use Raid 0 for speed. If you want data security go all the way to Raid 5 where you will still get the speed you need plus the backup.

[Ben Buie]

<<<-- Originally posted by Mike Gannon : I've been looking at the G-Raid and I'm pretty sure that the 320 GB is two 160 GBs in a striped array. I don't think you can mirror them for protection. Still, that's alot of storage at a 79mbs sustained rate for the price. Barring some bad reviews or learning I can't do what I need with it, I'll probably be adding it to my system. -->>>

The 320GB is (2) 160GB drives in a striped (RAID 0) array, which still gives you 320GB capacity. RAID 0 still retains the combined capacity of both drives.

Mirrored would defeat the purpose, as you would no longer get the 79MB/s transfer rate (assuming you have FW800).

I wonder what the AVG sustained write speed is though? Usually when a vendor supplies their "maximum sustained data rate" number it is for reading (which is obviously more important for real-time video work anyway), so I am curious what the write statistic is. I would imagine around half of the read speed.

By the way, if you purchase (2) FW800 cards and (2) 7200RPM firewire drives of equal size, and put them in a software RAID 0 array, you would likely get better performance than the G-RAID. Just a thought.

Ben

[Ben Buie]

After reading some of the above posts I just realised that some of the information I supplied in my last post might have been redundant.

Doh.

Ben

[Ben Buie]

You guys might want to check this out:

http://www.barefeats.com/fire46.html

It shows that the G-Raid and LaCie big disk extreme are roughly equivalent in "out of the box" performance.

It also shows two single firewire drives on separate firewire channels will also give you better performance than either "out of the box".

However, the more interesting thing to me is near the bottom of the test. Apparently you get consistent performance with the G-Raid throughout the entire capacity of the disk, which makes it unique among the other two.

I assume that, like most other shops, your drives are almost always half full, so in that case the G-Raid looks very attractive. A video drive that maintains its speed as it nears capacity is very good news, at least for us. I think the G-raid will be our next firewire drive for sure, especially given the reasonable price.