HD For Indies

HD Labs Report: Firmtek Seritek 1V4 Pre-Release Review

As I mentioned in my Firmtek Seritek 1SEN2 review the other day, Firmtek is planning on coming out with a 4 port Serial ATA card of their own, in both internal and external port models. (Hopefully both will be viewable at the MacWorld San Francisco conference next month)

I was a beta tester on the Seritek 1V4, which is the four internal SATA port product, and now that the cat is out of the bag, I can share my experiences with it.

The version of the card I tested had four internal Serial ATA ports. Since I'm not a big fan of internal ports, I routed the cables to the outside of the unit and connected them to my MacGurus.com Burly Boxes, with 8 Maxtor Maxline III 300 GB drives, my favorite bang/buck hard drives for uncompressed HD SATA work.

INSTALLATION:

It's a PCI-X card, which means that it won't slow down an adjacent card if mounted in slots 2 or 3 of a dual G5. This becomes important when you need to mount multiple cards in a computer.

Installation is simple, it takes about 10-15 minutes to shut down a PowerMac, put it on it's side, open it up, install the card, route cables, close it up again, and plug everything back in.

It's driverless, so that there is no software installation, and therefore no software driver incompatibilities. After installing the card and conecting drives, it just works.

One thing I really do like about their internal port cards is that they use the most solid, robust connectors for their internal connections as compared to everyone else's internal ports. The manufacturer claims these stouter ports will help protect against ESD (electrostatic discharge) damage. How likely is that to happen? I don't know, but since we're getting into the dry winter months, the thought of scuffing across the floor and static zapping my G5 dead as fried chicken is not an appealing thought. I just pulled off my fleece jacket and heard it crackle with static electricity - a possible death knell for computer circuitry.

As with all internal port cards, my recommendation is to route the cables out an empty PCI slot cover, anchor them with zip ties to the chassis to prevent yank damage/disconnects, and connect to an external SATA chassis. Firmtek's own Seritek 1EN2 is an interesting hotswap solution for 2 drives at a time. You can hook up 2 of these 2 drive enclosures to create up to a 4 drive RAID 0 stripe for the kind of performance I mention below. There are also external enclosure solutions from MacGurus and Granite Digital.

PERFORMANCE

Drives can be formatted as individual drives or striped into an array using either Apple's included Disk Utility or SoftRAID, which gives more options and controls. Performance is pretty much up to the drive - the card will pump data about as fast as the drive/s can disk it out. In my tests, I used four Maxtor Maxline III 300 GB SATA drives striped into a RAID 0 with SoftRAID 3.1, and got read speeds of 238 MB/sec, write speeds of 255 MB/sec using BlackMagic's Disk Speed Utility v4.6 on an otherwise empty array.

Doing my usual slice testing, which tests how drive performance falls off as the disks get full, here's what I saw:

(partitioned using SoftRAID 3.1)

Slice 1 (beginning of disk, fastest part): 238 MB/sec reads, 252 MB/sec writes
Slice 2 (20% full mark of array): 229 reads, 242 writes
Slice 3 (40% full mark of array): 212 reads, 225 writes
Slice 4 (60% full mark of array): 193/204
Slice 5 (80% full mark of array): 168/178
Last 25 GB (to check worst case performance): 139/147

As you can see, the performance is pretty impressive. Using two cards, performance should nearly double from what I've been told, but I haven't verified that myself.

What does that mean in terms of real world performance?

It should be able to handle multiple streams of SD uncompressed video just fine.

Obviously, multiple streams of compressed video should work OK as well.

Same goes for the compressed HD formats - DVCPRO HD, PhotoJPEG on BlackMagic, AJA's QRez, and eventually Avid's DNxHD should all do just fine, with support for multiple simultaneous streams (limited by and depending on seek times and throughputs of the drives involved, and the speed of the computer involved).

For uncompressed HD editors, it would work fine for 1080p or 1080i work just fine in 8 bit 4:2:2 video. If you are capturing at 10 bits/channel, you'd need to partition the array using SoftRAID to make sure that the performance would always be fast enough.

For 10 bit 4:2:2 1080p24 work, you'd be able to use 80-90% of the array's capacity.

For 1080i29.97 work, you'd be able to use at least 60% of the array with these particular drives (fast & large).

Maxtor also makes the DiamondMax10 300 GB drives, available for $206 presently at ZipZoomFly.com with free 2nd day shipping. These drives have nearly identical performance as compared to the Maxline III's but cost less (but aren't as enduring/robust, lesser warranty).

IN USE:

One thing in particular I REALLY liked about this card (in my limited testing) was that it never, EVER failed to mount drives upon reboot. I, and others, have had SIGNIFICANT problems with the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820a card failing to mount drives at startup or upon a reboot. I've had readers complain of 1820a arrays dropping offline in the middle of usage, with resulting complete data loss, a risk with ALL the RAID 0 SATA cards on the market.

Side note - I also recently had problems with beta hardware of the Sonnet Tempo-X 4+4 card I recently reviewed online, in that an array REPEATEDLY wouldn't mount upon multiple reboots (this happened after I posted my review). Sometimes I'd reboot and it would see 6 drives, sometimes it would see 7, but not all 8. I was trying to work on a project, so I just pulled the card and installed a RocketRAID 1820a for a while instead. Now, to be fair to Sonnet, that was with a beta, NON-RELEASE piece of hardware, and I might have just have had a loose cable somewhere. I just received my shipping unit Sonnet in the mail and I'll be installing and testing that soon.

One of the tests I want to put both pieces of shippng hardware through is a Reboot Test - simply reboot 20 or more times and see if it mounts the array every time.

REAL WORLD FINAL CUT PRO HD PLAYBACK TESTING:

OK, back on track here - I didn't get a chance to test as much as I would have liked to, but one of the things I did test was to see how well it would play back uncompressed HD in a real world setting.

So what I did was to set up various timelines in FCP HD 4.5 on my dual 2.5 GHz G5 and play back 10 minutes of HD footage. I had my settings such that if it dropped a frame it would abort playback and report the error. If it finished the sequence with no reported errors, that was a pass. If it didn't, that was a fail.

Working my way up from lowest to highest throughput media, here's what I got:

1080p24 8 bit 4:2:2 (24p HDCAM): PASSED all the way through to and including Last 25 GB of the array

1080i29.97 8 bit 4:2:2 (HDCAM 29.97 interlaced):: Not tested, but should pass based on the fac that it is less data than 1080p24 10 bit 4:2:2 (the next test below)

1080p24 10 bit 4:2:2 (HDCAM SR YUV, D-5): PASSED up to but NOT including the Last 25 GB partition (the last partition that passed was Slice 5)

1080i29.97 10 bit 4:2:2 (HDCAM SR YUV, D-5): PASSED through slice 3, slice 4 failed after a few minutes

1080p24 10 bit 4:4:4 (HDCAM SR RGB): Slices 1 & 2 passed, rest failed (so you could do SOME HDCAM SR work with this setup, just not a lot. The first sliced passed the first time, then failed after 6 1/2 minutes. Slice 2 passed. So if you were producing an HD short, you could offline then online in 10b444 RGB. Slice 1 & 2 are only about 35-40 minutes of footage. But any effects or color correction work gets downsampled to 8 bit RGB as I understand it...bummer.

Side note: after running these tests, I had a client tell me that they had trouble with their 1820a based system dropping frames after 10-15 minutes consistently. So testing testing methodogy isn't bulletproof - just because it'll play for 10 minutes doesn't mean it will play perfectly for an hour long show to record to tape. Doesn't mean it won't, either.

SUMMARY

PROS: low cost, high speed interface card (I like the future 4 external port better than the internal port version). Solid connectors. Driverless.

CONS: Internal ports a pain/risk/hassle to port to the outside of the chassis. Only 4 ports, not 8 (but you can use two in a G5). No RAID 10 support, so if the RAID 0 fails due to brownouts, drive failure, directory corruption, whatever, kiss your data goodbye (so back it up!). No RAID 3, 5, or 10 support via hardware or software.

If you are an indie wanting a low cost solution to do high speed uncompressed HD work, one of two of these (external) cards with an external enclosure looks like an excellent solution - fast, inexpensive, easy to deal with, provided you have a backup plan in place for your data. Although this has been the most reliable of the SATA cards I've tested to date (but I want more experience with the shipping unit), I still would like to see the industry provide a low cost fault tolerant SATA storage solution for Macs.

-mike