External Raid Disk Arrays For Video Editing

[jcalcagni]

My company essentially does composite video editing of raw data streams where we take uncompressed streams of video from multiple sources usually different disk drives and put them together on the screen at one time. This creates a huge problem when we try to go to demos for a client because laptop hard drives are a major bottle neck and make our software essentially unusable. What we are looking for is a hard drive array that we can take to demos with a laptop and show different clients our capabilities with a laptop using an eSATA Expresscard. We would prefer an array with 6 hard drives since we can support up to 6 streams at a time but I have pretty much given up on that idea since I have had very little luck finding anything with more than 4 or 5 hard drives but less than 8. So I am happy to accept 5 hard drives set up in Raid 5 to give use some protection if we are bringing the video to the client. Also almost all of the arrays that I have just use port multipliers in the array and a raid card mounted in the desktop to control the array which won?t work for us since we are trying to put this in a laptop. I have found an Expresscard Raid controller but I worry about the portability of using the hard drive array controlled by a Raid card in a laptop so I was really trying to find an enclosure that has a built in Raid controller that supports eSataII. The Buffalo DriveStation Quattro supports only eSata speeds of up to 100 MBps and the Lacie Biggest Quatro has write speeds of up to 70 MBps so none of these are giving us the through speed that I am looking for and seem like I should be able to get from eSata connected to a Raid Control. The only products that I have found are the Areca arc-5020 or the iAGE420UFE. I am not familiar with either product, I was wondering if anyone has any experiance with either of those products or another one that will fit the discription of what I am looking for.
Thanks
John

 

[supremelaw]

I'm not familiar with the bandwidth specs of Expresscards,
so bear that in mind as you continue reading ...

Addonics is a good company: their Expresscard RAID controller
supports 2 SATA/3G ports: that implies a MAX HEADROOM
of 2 x 300MB/second = 600 MB/second:

However, that bandwidth is theoretical at best, and
actual bandwidth has to be lower because those two channels
probably won't operate in parallel inside your laptop.

http://www.addonics.com/produc...troller/adexc34-2e.asp

And, there will be overhead, necessarily.

Gigabit Ethernet is probably going to be much slower, with a MAX HEADROOM
of about 133 MB/second (minus overhead):

http://www.addonics.com/produc...ntroller/adn1gex34.asp


I would try to find a laptop that supports 4 x eSATA ports,
e.g. via expansion cards, and connect them to a RAID 0, for speed.

Getting all 4 to operate in parallel is likely to be your biggest challenge.


I'm aware of another company like Addonics: www.cooldrives.com
Check them out!


Good luck.


Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell, Inventor and
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library

All Rights Reserved without Prejudice

 

[supremelaw]

Here's another option that will definitely give you the speed you need: Multi-Lane SATA/3G with "Infiniband" cables:

http://www.addonics.com/products/multilane/

http://www.*****/syst...ckplane%20REV.02.1.jpg
http://www.*****/syst...ckplane%20REV.02.2.jpg
http://www.*****/syst...ckplane%20REV.02.3.jpg


http://www.*****/syst...cket%20Backplane.1.jpg
http://www.*****/syst...cket%20Backplane.2.jpg
http://www.*****/syst...cket%20Backplane.3.jpg
http://www.*****/syst...cket%20Backplane.4.jpg


But, you'll need to switch to a Small Form Factor case with room for these PCI brackets,
because those brackets are too big for most laptops of which I am aware.

If this connection option will satisfy your portability need,
you then have a lot of options to choose from,
as far as HDDs are concerned e.g. 2.5" HDDs rotating
at 5,400, 7,200, 10,000 and 15,000 rpm.

The new enterprise-class VelociRaptor ("VR") has also been
announced withOUT the IcePak cooler in 150GB and 300GB capacities:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products...riveid=494&language=en

Check out the Enhance Tech QuadraPack Q14 also,
because of the high density it affords:

http://www.enhance-tech.com/pr...ts/multidrive/q14.html


Call Enhance Tech first, to confirm whether or not the
2.5" VR will work with the Q14's internal SATA backplane:

http://www.*****/syst...ce-tech/q14_open_G.gif



Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell, Inventor and
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library

All Rights Reserved without Prejudice

 

[supremelaw]

Can you find a laptop with 2 x Cardbus slots?

http://www.shopaddonics.com/mm...S/Images/adcb2sa-e.gif

Sometimes, laptops come with removable optical drives,
which opens a slot for compatible cards.


Just a thought


Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell, Inventor and
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library

All Rights Reserved without Prejudice

 

[supremelaw]

http://www.addonics.com/produc...roller/adcbsar5-2e.asp


[begin excerpt]

You can also attach to each eSATA port as many as 5 hard drives in an external drive enclosures that has built-in Port Multiplier such as the Addonics Storage Tower. The 5 hard drives can be configured as RAID 1, 0, 10 or 5. Using the JBOD configuration, you can combine the 5 hard drives into one large 2 TeraByte external storage system for your Notebook.

Together with Addonics' family of eSATA cabling system, Notebook users can enjoy the fastest performance with any external storage devices, as much as 3 times the data transfer rate of the USB 2.0. The CardBus eSATA RAID5/JBOD Adapter incorporated the new eSATA connector providing secured cable connection, improved durability, increased EMI protection, and up to 2 meters cable length for external SATA connection. (For more detail on this new SATA external connector, please review the following white paper posted on SATA-Irg)

[end excerpt]


Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell, Inventor and
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library

All Rights Reserved without Prejudice

 

[jcalcagni]

My concern which maybe you can put to rest for me is that we have multiple different people that each already have there own laptops that can get sent out to clients site and the idea was whoever was going out could take this array with them and use it with there personal laptop. So if I was to setup the Array as a raid using the addonics expresscard (which if I am not mistaken taps strait into the pci-express bus so there should be significant capablity there for transfer rate) and build the array on one persons laptop would another person be able to grab the card and array and have it reconize for them or is there some table that would get stored localy on the laptop that built the array?

 

[Yellowbeard]

Just curious, why not use USB or Firewire? They are plenty fast for what you are wanting to do.