HD For Indies

For a few years I've been writing about using SATA based RAIDs for uncompressed HD projects. Slooooooowly but surely, some RAID 5 (fault tolerant, don't lose all your data if a drive craters) solutions have been coming to market.

At first, they were PCI only (during the PCI-X G5 years). So they were too slow for uncompressed HD (this was before DVCPRO HD native editing was popularized).

Then there were PCI-X cards, but they were still too slow - 80-110 MB/sec write speed for RAID 5 - far too slow for the serious work I wanted to do (10 bit 1080i60 is about 160 MB/sec, need about 200 MB/sec throughput for reliable performance with overhead).

Then I got a Highpoint card, which was a bit slow - one of the 1800 series something or other cards (I'm writing this in Newark airport on way to Spain, can't exactly look on the Shelf Of Old Tech to check).

Slowly but surely, more choices. I recently visited a client's shop that had been running one of the newer Highpoint cards (the 2314 was it?) in RAID 5 mode with PLENTY of throughput for uncompressed HD.

I just read this review on CalDigit's HDPro, the writer runs it through its paces with an 8 bit 1080i60 onlining project.

Then I got an 8 drive, 4TB review unit from Dulce that I am overdue to finish my write up and return the unit, but it has been performing splendidly as well.

I think we're there in terms of affordable, fault tolerant storage. They don't have the maintenance features we'd like, you should probably still wipe the RAIDs between projects (still utterly unrealistic in most working situations with overlapping jobs), but the price is getting closer to doable for a broad swath of budget constrained indies.

Give it another year or so for fault tolerance to be a "yeah, of course, throw that in" option on storage.

I'll have more to say when I publish my full Dulce unit review when I get back from Sitges (Spain).

-mike

UPDATE Shane Ross wrote in to ask how I missed his review, in 4 places no less, of the same CalDigit review.

It is MUCH more thorough, go read that one for a better explanation and better testing, including throughput testing on both a mac Pro (over 300 MB/sec!) and a laptop (over 150 MB/sec. Laptop!).

Here's his:

LITTLE FROG IN HIGH DEF: REVIEW-CALDIGIT HD PRO

Labels: hardware, storage