HD For Indies

UPDATED AGAIN 12/22/04- SEE BOTTOM OF REPORT

Sonnet Technologies today announced their own 8 port Serial ATA card for Macs, the Tempo-X SATA 4+4. It requires no drivers whatsoever, and has four internal and four external ports.

Remember that article I wrote the other week about what was wrong with every Serial ATA card on the market? This isn't one of those cards.

I've been testing a pre-release version of this card recently and found it to be an improvement over the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820a card in the following ways:

1.) half the ports are external (too bad not all of'em)
2.) drives don't mysteriously go offline or fail to show at bootup
3.) performance is higher
4.) requires no drivers - truly plug 'n play

Robert over at Bare Feats also tested a pre-release version of the card, and he has a nice review of it here with pictures and graphs and a nice comparison chart of the available SATA cards available for Mac. It's good enough I'm not going to bother trying to recreate something that says the same stuff, just go look at it over there.

So what does this card do? It has 8 ports, 4 external (on the outside of the PCI slot cover) and 4 internal (that you can route calbes out of an empty PCI slot cover, even if you're using a "fat" video card like the NVidia 6800 series or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB version).

It requires zero drivers - plug it in and go. Hook up to 8 drives to it using an external enclosure such as the Burly Box from MacGurus and away you go. While there are products that allow for internal SATA drives, I'm not a fan of them, they don't work for my intended workflows, so I ignore'em. If you want to go internal, check out the solutions from Wiebetech (G5 Jam) and, umm, somebody else I can't think of.

Performance is impressive - not only is the unit more stable (so far) than the 1820a card, it's also faster. Barefeats has posted some impressive numbers, but I got even better - I put the Sonnet card in slot 4 of my dual 2.0 GHz G5, and the HD card (a BlackMagic DeckLink HD Pro Dual Link, the 4:4:4 model) and used the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test utility to measure performance. This utility gives a pretty good approximation of the real demands of capturing video, which is my primary concern, so I use that for benchmarking.

The way I tests disks, I partition the array into 5 equal sections (444 GB for the 8 300 GB disks I have) and then cut the 5th one short to make a 6th partition of the very last disk. This lets me see how performance would degrade as the array got full (as is the case with virtually all RAID setups). Drives are fastest when they are empty, and get slower as they get full of data. I run the BMD Disk Speed Test utility a number of times and use the average of several runs.

Maximum performance comes from the first part of the array, when all the disks are reading/writing to the outermost tracks.

Using BlackMagic's Disk Speed Test utility, I measured read speeds of 463 MB/sec on my 8 drive array using Maxtor Maxline III 300 GB drives, and 506 MB/sec write speeds.

Damn!

As the array gets full, it slows down, but is still very fast. Here's the full test suite:

Partition 1: 462.8 reads, 506.2 writes
Partition 2: 440.4 reads, 469.2 writes
Partition 3: 411.3 reads, 440.2 writes
Partition 4: 357.7 reads, 383.5 writes
Partition 5: 328.0 reads, 351.9 writes
Partition 6 (Last 15 GB): 252.9 reads, 272.2 writes

As you can see, this disk array should be sufficent for ANY uncompressed HD needs, up to and including 10 bit, 4:4:4 RGB 1920x1080 at 60 fields per second (which is a 238.8 MB/sec video stream). Even with 20% safety overhead, that would call for 290 MB/sec. An 8 drive RAID 0 should provide that up to about 90% full capacity.

BUT...it's still RAID 0. And that's one of my few quibbles with this card. If any one of those 8 drives go out, all 2.4 TB of my data would be GONE.

What's the fix? Or at leats the low cost fix? RAID 10. RAID 10 is cheap and easy to implement, but has not been implemented on this card...yet.

RAID 10 is dumb but simple - you would have a 4 drive RAID 0, and then mirror it with...another 4 drive RAID 0. This cuts both throughput and capacity in half, but if it's done in software, is a MUCH cheaper solution than the RAID 3 and RAID 5 solutions on the market. If you have a failure, the other half of the mirror is there for recovery/restoration. If set up properly, it just gives you a warning and lets you keep working until you repair the damaged half and resynchronize.

RAID 3 and RAID 5 are more elegant...but tend to be more expensive per GB, and have lower maximum speeds (but stay faster longer than RAID 10).

As an aside, I've been testing Apple's mighty $13,000, 14x400 GB drive, 5.6TB X-Serve RAID, and while I'm not done tweaking on it, have yet to break the 200 MB/sec barrier for write speeds in a RAID 50 configuration. I can get 2 1/2 times that performance with a $2500 RAID 0...but in an unprotected, non-fault tolerant setup. But as with ANY RAID 0 from any vendor, that's kinda like saying my car goes 400 miles an hour...but has bad brakes, no seat belts and a giant metal spike on the steering wheel pointed at my chest. RAID 0 is vulnerable to catastrophic failure at any time a drive goes bad. But don't take those X-Serve RAID numbers as gospel - I need to have a serious geek to geek conversation with their tech guys before I sign off on that's all it will do.

Anyway, back to RAID 10 - it can be done in software (nobody has for Mac yet) or with a software/firmware combo, which is how Highpoint has implemented it with their RocketRAID 1820a card...although poorly (I could never get mine to work right, others apparently have though). I've been trying to pressure SoftRAID to offer RAID 10 in a future version, but apparently unsuccessfully. If you'd like to see SoftRAID implement software RAID 10, let them know by emailing them at sales@softraid.com.

Other things I'd like in this card - all external ports. Did I say that? I'll say it again anyway.

OK, bitching aside, this card is the most promising thing on the market, and at a very attactive price point. If you are an indie trying to do an uncompressed online with your HD project, this is the best shipping low cost solution I know of, IF YOU HAVE A BACKUP of all your data, such as with a FireWire drive system. If you are a facility, get an X-Serve RAID (or similar) instead.

(As a side note, the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820a card and the Sonnet card can't co-exist. If the RocketRAID drivers are installed, it freaks out the Sonnet card and causes mayhem. So pick one or the other but not both in the same box)

-mike

UPDATE 12/13/04:

While working on a Final Cut Pro HD project using my dual 2.0 GHz G5, I had some difficulty with the Tempo-X 4+4 card. Repeated attempts to get the array to mount on bootup failed. 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 and in a hurry, 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, finalized Sonnet in the mail and I'll be installing and testing that soon.

One of the tests I want to do with the RocketRaid 1820a, the Sonnet Tempo-X 4+4, and the Firmtek Seritek 1SE2 and 1V4 cards (with shipping hardware) is a Reboot Test - simply reboot 20 or more times and see if it mounts the array every time. My gut at this point says that the 1SE2 and/or 1V4 cards would probably do best, but that's conjecture at this point. I find it troubling that I had this difficulty with the Sonnet card (again, it's pre-release, not finalized shipping product). It uses the same ASIC for SATA stuff that the 1820a does, and I'd hate to see the kinds of trouble with the Tempo that I did with the 1820a (I don't recommend the 1820a any longer for external SATA enclosures, unless they change something in hardware/firmware/software).

UPDATE 12/22/04

Quick update - after that last report when I said that I had trouble getting a Sonnet Tempo X 4+4 card based RAID 0 to mount, I haven't had any trouble with it since if I power up the drives before the G5 (which is proper procedure anyway). So it may have been a fluky setup on my part, loose cable, or somesuch.

I've captured a bunch of video and played it back, including a one hour and 8 minute long single capture, which didn't drop any frames. In various testing I've played back at least 10 hours of footage and had maybe 3 or 4 dropped frames under various harsh testing regimes, so that isn't bad at all.
-mike