06-13-2010, 06:34 PM

Hello everyone... I've been surfing this forum for some time now, but I am not sure I've really posted anything until now. I've spent several hours this weekend research an issue, and it's gotten to the point where I am not really sure how to proceed. So I thought I'd ask for some opinions here. But first, allow me to provide a bit of background. I apologize in advance for a lengthy first post, but I feel that it's necessary to explain the situation.

A good friend gave me a "broken" 2.0 GHz G5 machine, a few months ago. He said that the Logic Board was toast, per his research. So I thought I'd replace it maybe, as a project. Well to make a long story short--it wasn't the logic board at all...it was bad RAM. After spending several hours researching the issue in the various Mac forums, I got the thing working. It now runs great, and so I've decided to upgrade it a bit. I've since installed Leopard through 10.5.8, and that's all working well; it's even talking to my Mackie Onyx firewire board nicely. In addition, I maximized the RAM at 8GB, and that's working great as well. As my intentions are to learn FCS (I've got quite a bit of experience with Sony Vegas on a PC that I built), I've ordered a 256MB ATI Radeon 9650 video card, and will install that to replace the 64mb card when it arrives this week. I've heard that Motion loves RAM, so I wanted to upgrade as it was fairly easy and inexpensive to do so. Finally, I also replaced the hard drives with a Seagate 500GB system drive, and a WD 1TB scratch drive. Then I installed FCS 2 and Logic Express. But here's the problem...

I should have known better than to take the word of a kid working at one of the tech stores in my area, and I should have done my own research into the choice for the scratch drive. But I happened to be in the store and the kid seemed knowledgeable enough, so I bought the 1TB drive the other day. But I should NOT have gotten the WD Green Caviar drive to use as a scratch drive! It's only about 5400rpm (no one seems to know for sure, as WD doesn't really tell), so it probably won't be all that great for a scratch disk for FCP or Logic. However I bought it, it's now installed, and I've already used it to make a Time Machine backup of the system drive. So what I am planning now is to buy an external hard drive enclosure, and set up a pair of 1TB drives in RAID-1 configuration. I also have a 17" Macbook Pro that I bought last fall, and it's running Logic Express as well. So I could probably install FCP on it, and then use it to do remote video/audio recording onto an external HD array as the need arises. So planning this, the dilemma is which external JD product(s) to buy.

Quite simply, I've spent so much time reading customer reviews on the various external firewire/eSATA drive enclosures and drive products, that I am really not sure which to purchase at this point. For every couple of good reviews on any of these products, there are other people saying how terrible that particular product is. It's gotten to the point that I am really not sure what to believe, so I was just thinking of buying two Seagate 1TB drives like this one, and then getting an enclosure from Glyph or something like that. My intention is to use the firewire 800 port on both the G5 and the MBP for data transfer, but I think it would be prudent to buy an enclosure with eSATA capabilities as well. Then I could use an eSATA adapter for the MBP, and I could install a PCI-x eSATA card into the G5 machine. So buying an enclosure with eSATA support seems logical. But this may not be necessary.

One thing I've noticed is that many of the threads I am finding on this issue are somewhat outdated (2004-2006 timeframe). Thus I was hoping to maybe hear some advice on recent products--maybe from the past year or so.

Thanks in advance for the help!

TB

06-13-2010, 09:53 PM

Can I get the "CliffsNotes" version of this post!

- Nick

06-13-2010, 11:00 PM

1) External HD & enclosure...which ones for FCS/Logic?
2) RAID-1 vs non-RAID system?

That's about it. Just don't ask why I want to know, or tell me to go research this stuff, lol.

TB

06-14-2010, 07:35 AM

Honestly, there are a ton of external enclosures that are quite nice. Next one I plan to by is a G-Raid unit ( G-Technology - G-RAID - Professional High-Performance Dual-Drive Storage System ).

Honestly, for scratch, I'd use RAID-0, not RAID-1. Yes, RAID 1 provides redundancy regarding drive failures, but is slower then raid-0 - you want speed when it comes to scratch disks.

For data protection, I offload my master footage onto a RAID-5 array. For editing I either use a single drive for scratch or a RAID-0 array.

06-14-2010, 08:09 AM

I looked at the G-raid products, and they look nice. So do the Lacie products. But as I said in my first post, for every couple of people saying how nice they are, there is someone saying how quickly they fail. So it's gotten to the point that I don't know which way to go--but a G-raid product like this sure looks like a nice deal for the money. (It's the 1TB version of the product you linked to.) But I guess it just comes down to the fact that there are DOA hard drives with any brand, and you just never know how long a product such as this is going to last.

About the RAID-1 vs RAID-0 though... I understand your point about RAID-0, but if a single 7200rpm drive is adequate to capture HD video via either firewire 800 (or eSATA), then I am not really sure why you'd need to use a RAID-0 array to go faster? I am just trying to learn this stuff now, so I am not trying to criticize your opinion at all...just trying to understand. But I would think that a two disk RAID-1 array such as I've link to above, would be a relatively inexpensive solution for this problem. I understand your reasoning for going RAID-0 of course; I'm just not sure I understand why it would be needed.

By the way, what brand of drive do you like? I am not sure what brand G-raid or Lacie uses in their products, but I've read some reviews that complained that these drives weren't enterprise-level, and (essentially) were the most inexpensive drives the manufacturers could find. I have read particularly bad reports about Hitachi drives.

Thanks for the post.

TB

EDIT: I just went back and looked at that G-raid drive again. I thought that it allowed either a RAID-0 or a RAID-1 arrangement, but I guess it's only RAID-0. I must have read it wrong before. I've looked at so many of these things that I must have mixed them up a bit--but this product allows the user to set up either a RAID-0 or a RAID-1 configuration.

06-14-2010, 09:57 AM

SATA has a certain speed rating, but that is really a max rating; not a speed you're guaranteed to get with a given single drive - just the capability of the technology. Many (most) times a single drive can't maintain a sustained transfer rate as high as what SATA can offer (FW can be a different story depending on the chassis and the HD you have in the chassis as FW is significantly slower then SATA).

With a RAID 0 array, you have a greater chance of maintaining a higher transfer rate because instead of one drive being accessed continuously, the work is split between two different drives.

Here's a (although old) comparison of single drive vs raid 0 running seagate barracudas @ 7200 rpm: Single Drive and RAID 0 SATA NCQ Performance with Seagate's Barracuda 7200.7 - Bjorn3D.com - you can see from the chart, sustained transfer rate is pretty much always higher with the RAID 0 device.

Now, Here's something to think about - if you're doing basic video editing - let's say graduations, weddings, etc. where your most common work will be 1 - 3 video tracks simultaneously (some of this will depend on the source, for example ProRES 422 LT takes a lot less bandwidth then ProRES 422 or ProRES 422 HQ) you can easily get away with Firewire 800 and a single drive (in all honesty, most of the editing I do is only a couple of tracks and I usually only use either a sata, FW800 or if I'm in a pinch USB2 (USB2 usually requires more rendering and rendering takes forever with usb 2) ).

If you're working on something with many simultaneous video tracks, or extremely high bitrate source (ie: DigiBeta @ 90mbps or DVCPro HD which can potentially top out at about 100mbps) you can see how very quickly it's possible to overcome Firewire in sustained transfer, and even single drive sata systems where you will want/need a raid array to maintain a higher data throughput.

A lot will depend on what you're working on (project wise), what your working with (footage wise), etc. to choose the right product for your needs. Like in my case, I use 2 different cameras - they top out at 17mbps and 24mbps, so I usually use ProRES422 at most. Most of my projects are single long recordings that require at most two tracks of video. For the nature of my projects, a single FW800 drive or I can use USB2.0 if I need to (with the aforementioned rendering which does slow down the workflow) is enough. For the few projects that require a bit more I can use a SATA drive (usually projects I solely handle on my Mac Pro where I have an internal SATA drive reserved for just video editing).

In terms of drives I prefer - I'm not terribly brand loyal; but the two I have used most are Seagates Barracudas (you will want to check cache levels; the new XT line looks nice, but appears to require next gen sata) and Western Digital Caviar Black drives. Yes, you do need to make sure it's the WD Caviar Black because you really don't want the blue/green version as your scratch drive (due to the way it works for conserving power and such - also the blue/green are not designed to be used in RAID arrays and are not recommended for them because of their design). The WD Black drives are more expensive then the other WD drives, but I have had good luck with them (I currently have 3 of them, 2 in my raid 5 and 1 elsewhere).

Unfortunately, as you already know - all drives can and will fail. Mechanical/moving parts will eventually fail - and although they may have a huge MTBF, one can fail as early as right when you plug it in, and as late as decades later (I still have some 10 meg drives from the 80's that still work fine). It's a good idea to back up your source elsewhere just in case something happens to your scratch drive so you have the potential to re-import your footage and get back to work.

The most beautiful thing is - you don't have to buy max what you'll need now. What I'd suggest is get a decent chassis that has all three adapters (USB, eSata, FW800) and get a good drive to put in it (you can start with a single drive system, get a second drive an another chassis to work as backup storage for your footage if you want). I suggest this path because in the future as you upgrade, you'll want to use things that don't restrict you - if you buy a chassis with a hard drive in it already, it's restricting you to that drive (as cracking the case voids the warranty usually), but with an empty chassis that you can populate you have more choices on chassis to fit your need and actual hard drives that you can put into the chassis rather then be stuck with what a given manufacturer decides they feel you need.

06-14-2010, 12:09 PM

Originally Posted by pigoo3

Can I get the "CliffsNotes" version of this post!

- Nick

2 FUNNY! lol

06-14-2010, 12:32 PM

Note: Thread moved to appropriate forum.

06-14-2010, 06:04 PM

Excellent response Nethfel...thank you very much!

I was thinking along the same lines as your recommendations--a nice case with several options for connections. Something like this, perhaps. I've had pretty good luck with both the Seagate Barracuda drives, and the WD Black drives as well. And thanks for the explanation about burst vs sustained data rates. I guess I knew that for the most part, but didn't appreciate how relevant it might be in this situation. I checked out that page you linked to, and the RAID-0 sure does make a difference with file copying/transfer.

So when all is said and done, I'll probably just go with something like the Glyph enclosure I linked to, along with a couple of Seagate or WD drives. Then I'll probably just use firewire 800, as I am usually only recording/processing one channel of HDV...two at the most.

Thanks again for the help.

TB

06-17-2010, 07:38 AM

Yesterday I ordered a Glyph GT 062E 1TB external drive array from B&H. I called Glyph and talked to them, and they currently use Seagate 7200.12 drives. So between the firewire 800 ports and the eSATA capability, I should be good to go with either the G5, my Macbook Pro, or the Mac Pro I will likely upgrade to within the next year.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in this thread. I appreciate the posts...

TB