Need 600MB/s+

Ultim8 · 25 Jan 2011 at 10:52

Ok so i have just bought a new usb3.0 capture device (Black Magic Intensity Shuttle) and i need some serious HDD speed.
Obviously due to the amount of data being written I don't want to use any SSD's. So give me some solutions, im currently looking at 6 drives and a raid card running raid 0 but i have no idea what options there are out there on raid cards, i would also like a sata3 raid card if its an option.

rpstewart · 25 Jan 2011 at 11:23

1) Why do you need that sort of write speed? What the heck kind of data is coming out of the device?

2) If it's USB3 connected then you'll need to make sure that the data path between the USB3 port and the disks is capable of carrying the data rate you're looking for.

cmndr_andi · 25 Jan 2011 at 11:27

If you are using a RAID card - then you don't need the individual hard drive connections to be SATA 6Gbps to achieve 600MB/s total array write speed, SATA II (3Gbps) will be fine.

Anyway - AFAIK there are no standard mechanical SATA drives than can sustain much more than 150MB/s - so even the ones than do use a SATA 6Gbps interface, this faster interface is basically wasted.

Personally I would suggest going down the road of RAID 5 - it will be a bit more expensive to set up than RAID 0, but with RAID 5 if one drive fails then your data is still OK. In a RAID 0 array, one drive dies and all your data is gone - and the chance of one drive failing increases when you use more drives.

Mercutio · 25 Jan 2011 at 11:37

The max throughput of a Dell Perc 5/i was clocked at about 800 MB/s I think. The perc 6i does 1GB/s both can be had for around a ton (£100) and may need a bit of tweaking/modding to be used in a normal case but otherwise will do a very nice job.

6 good mechanical drives attached to a decent raid 5 card (or even a fairly cheap one as above) will see you in the sort of bandwidth range your after i'd think (4 WD AAKS/Cav blues got me to 380ish max sequencial on a 5i and their fairly old hat now). If you can throw new model velociraptors at it you'll manage it easilly i'd think.

Evil-I · 25 Jan 2011 at 11:47

cmndr_andi said:
Personally I would suggest going down the road of RAID 5 - it will be a bit more expensive to set up than RAID 0, but with RAID 5 if one drive fails then your data is still OK. In a RAID 0 array, one drive dies and all your data is gone - and the chance of one drive failing increases when you use more drives.

+1

Definately go RAID 5 or 6, RAID0 multiplies the chance of you losing all your data by the number of drives in the array, so a six drive RAID0 array is six times more likely to fail than a single hard drive losing everything.

Only consider proper hardware RAID cards from people like LSI/ 3WARE Adaptec etc, software based RAID is no good for this sort of application, you want something that does all its own processing.

Also data rate wise a single stream of 4:2:2 1080p HD footage works out at about 7.4Gb per running minute so a sustained data rate of 123.33 Mb second. Thats not actually too bad!

You may still have to look at SAS drives rather than sata though, as from my experience using standard sata drives in a large array doesn't give great performance. We have some big file servers that are used for archiving work that run 8 x 750Gb and 8 x 1Tb Sata drives in RAID5 (two different arrays) on an AMCC/3WARE sata controller and yet barely acheive 150Mb sec sustained data rate.

If you're going to be working at your new devices full 4:2:2 at 1080p and want to run multiple streams for editing/ compositing etc, I'd be suggesting an 8 drive array on SAS drives running RAID5. Not gonna be cheap though!

E-I

Ultim8 · 25 Jan 2011 at 11:54

brilliant thanks for the advice Mercutio, they are huge mind you!

Evil-I · 25 Jan 2011 at 11:57

Actually I tell a lie,

Just ran HDtune on one of the servers running an AMCC 9650SE-16ML RAID card running 8 x 750Gb Seagate ES (Enerprise model) sata hard drives in RAID 5 and got a minimum sustained data read rate of 215.2MB/s and 331.7 MB/s Maximum (average of 321.4). So not quite as bad as I remember. So I'd say at a push with more modern SATA hard drives on a similar raid card you'd be touching 400MB/s +

Ultim8 · 25 Jan 2011 at 11:58

I appreciate raid 5 is more viable but i dont care, im after a cost effective solution to get 500mbs+ (not actually 600) so i can write huge files to the storage i will then edit it/encode it and move it to my secure storage for keeping.

So all this will be is a temp directory to write to fast and edit.

Make sense?

Evil-I · 25 Jan 2011 at 12:04

Ultim8 said:
I appreciate raid 5 is more viable but i dont care, im after a cost effective solution to get 500mbs+ (not actually 600) so i can write huge files to the storage i will then edit it/encode it and move it to my secure storage for keeping.

So all this will be is a temp directory to write to fast and edit.

Make sense?

Yes'ish, my only comment, is that from experience the footage on this array will take a while to capture etc and recapturing stuff when it fails can eat an awful lot of time (and you'll always end up storing stuff on there longer than you might think). Whether you go RAID 5 or RAID 0 you'll still need a butch propoer hardware RAID card to acheive your data throughput and the only additional cost for going RAID5 is adding an additional hard drive for the parity information.....

Ultim8 · 25 Jan 2011 at 12:15

i take the point Evil, i may go raid 5 and use it as storage aswell.
Can you recommend a decent raid card that works under windows 7 and supports 6-8 drives. The reason i asked for a sata3 solution is i may go for raptor drives and in the future SSD's. The video capture thing is only a temporary thing for a project.

Evil-I · 25 Jan 2011 at 12:37

I've always been happy with the 3ware/ AMCC cards. There are a lot of them out there so you may well be able to pick up a second hand one that will do the job. Probably need to go for a 3ware 9650SE-8LPML or similar. 8port/ pci-express etc....

To go Sata3 you're probably talking fairly big bucks. something like 3ware SAS 9750-8i Kit, which is a SATA3 based SAS/SATA controller, but is probably round the £400 mark.

No experience of the the sata 3 ones to be honest, but typically on proper raid cards it all just works without any complications.

Ultim8 · 25 Jan 2011 at 13:07

thanks Evil

Evil-I · 25 Jan 2011 at 13:22

No problem,

When buying be careful of the PCI-X PCI-Express difference, I accidently bought a second hand PCI-X card for my home server which meant I could only use it on big server type motherboards that had the 64bit PCI-X slot. I had meant to buy PCI-Express... To be honest I got it for such a good price it worked out okay in the end, just not so future proof.

E-I

Ultim8 · 25 Jan 2011 at 13:54

Yeah at my old company we used to buy them in pci-x for a customer, infact we accidentally bought a pcie once i believe it was the one you suggested. I might see if they still have it and want to shift it cheap actually

Zarf · 25 Jan 2011 at 13:58

The perc 5/i tops out around 350MB/s write speed in RAID5, I think the most cost effective option is going to be a software RAID0 since 8 port controllers that can do parity writes at over 500MB/s are very costly. 5 or 6 of the Spinpoint F4 320GB drives should do the job (£30 each on TWO)
Use your onboard SATA ports (or some cheap bog standard 2 port PCI-E SATA-3Gb/s controllers( or even a SATA-6Gb/s controller if you want it for the future)) and then use the Windows built in Software RAID0. Since all you care about is speed that'll be fine (that 24 SSD video doing over 2000MB/s used windows software RAID0) and allows you to mix and match with some drive using your intel onboard and some on an add-in controller.

Toytown · 25 Jan 2011 at 14:30

Ok so i have just bought a new usb3.0 capture device (Black Magic Intensity Shuttle) and i need some serious HDD speed

Are you sure you need that much speed, the technical specs for the card say that capturing 1920x1080/60(10bit)uncompressed requires 158MB a second and thats the very best the card will do.

Ultim8 · 25 Jan 2011 at 15:09

Toytown said:
Are you sure you need that much speed, the technical specs for the card say that capturing 1920x1080/60(10bit)uncompressed requires 158MB a second and thats the very best the card will do.

hmmm thats not what i was told.......should have RTFM, Thanks though Toytown for pointing it out and saving me a few hundred quid.

Zarf · 26 Jan 2011 at 04:20

Ultim8 said:
hmmm thats not what i was told.......should have RTFM, Thanks though Toytown for pointing it out and saving me a few hundred quid.

They were probably confused by USB 3.0 supporting to 4.8GB/s, or 614MB/s. This is likely less than 500MB/s after overheads.

Evil-I · 26 Jan 2011 at 11:10

Toytown said:
Are you sure you need that much speed, the technical specs for the card say that capturing 1920x1080/60(10bit)uncompressed requires 158MB a second and thats the very best the card will do.

Don't forget thats only the capturing of a single stream of video. So if once captured you're editing and have 2 or 3 streams of video in the timeline at once, doing cross fades/ transparency, PIPs etc then you have to multiply the amount of data throughput required by how many streams of video are playing concurrently.

Thats of course if you're ever likely to be using full uncompressed 1080p video. To be honest even with our couple of hundred grands worth of full HiDef Avid edit suite at our office here, we never go as far as uncompressed 1080p, its just too massively big and unweildy, we tend to use something like the Avid DNX HD codecs which give very acceptable quality in full Hi Def but has a much lower data rate.

E-I

meansizzler · 27 Jan 2011 at 03:47

I have an Intensity Shuttle, not got working yes as it needs ful 5GB/s bandwidth which hardly any mobo apart from x58 can handle..

I have 2 WD Scorpio Black 500GB 2.5"HD in RAID 0 and was getting average 250MB/s Write, but I will probably use 2 or 3 samsung f4 2tb in raid and probably get 400-450MB/S...

You shouldn't need the full 500MB/s for capturing as at 720P/60 your looking at 165MB/s uncompressed