eSata for connecting external RAID drive sets

[Gary Bettan]

Stardom sells a 4 bay enclosure for $329.

SOHORAID SR4 Enclosure with Hardware RAID 0,5

Videoguys.com - SOHORAID SR4 Enclosure with Hardware RAID 0,5

Gary

[Paul Kapp]

Originally Posted by Andrew Smith

Thanks Bob,

The computer is yet to be built, but will be in the very near future. I'm keen to do it right and this is part of the research.

I've purchased my upgrade to Adobe Production Premium Suite 5.5 and I'm about to purchase a Matrox MXO2 (with Max technology for super speedy h264 encoding). The MXO2 is connects via PCIe.

I've got a large collection of HDV recordings and will continue to record to this format with my Sony V1 camera. From time to time there will also be content in the AVCHD format from the Sony HXR NX5 camera.

With the Matrox MXO2 gear, there is the option to capture to 25, 50 and even 100Mbit/sec mpeg2 files for super quality work. I think this option is there with a view to having higher quality video to do good chromakey work with, etc.

Andrew

Hi Andrew.
I have Premiere 5.5 on a pc Windows 7 64bit, a couple of cheap Seagate 1Tb drives in RAID 0 and an Nvidea GTX470.
This is able to playback uncompressed QT (captured on a Hyperdeck Shuttle)using CUDA multicore parallel processing and mix them with effects.
When it comes to export, the GTX470 speeds up rendering as well.
Only Nvidea and Pr CS5 on 64bit Windows 7 can do this, using Premiere's Mercury playback.
First time ever I have enjoyed realtime playback on a pc without an expensive card.
I believe a lower spec nvidea card for about $100 will do fine.

With tapeless ingest, there is no need for editing cards.
Not sure about AVCH playback, but Premiere / Mercury probably handles them as well.
I believe there is an expensive($500) plugin for H264 acceleration.

[Michael Richard]

If you go with a RAID 5 setup is it still recommended to backup the whole RAID to an external? In other words the redundancy isn't failsafe?

[Andrew Smith]

With RAID5 you can lose one physical drive out of 4 and you're still running.

You can still make backups of the RAID drive set if you want, but I pretty much wouldn't bother except for as an off-site backup in case of fire, earthquake or nuclear detonation.

You don't really have much risk of losing a single hard drive, but RAID5 will enable you to lose data if this should happen. The chances of losing two or more drives at the same time is truly remote.

Andrew