Not 3D related but OS X/RAID setup related

[suryad]

Hey all,

I am lookingto be a bit more adventurous and getting a Mac Pro workstation with a 30 inch screen. I am timeframing my purchase around when Leopard gets announced and when the 2 x quad processors get announced. Here's to hoping that ATI releases R600 based vid cards as well for the Mac.

My question is, do yall in your infinite wisdom know of any hardware raid controllers that have drivers for OS X? SAS would be preferred. I am thinking of starting out with a couple of Maxtor 15k rpm SAS drives. This will be a video processing and editing rig for the most of the time. Sort of like a testbed to deal with HD footage.

Thanks for any input and apologies if this is the wrong section for this topic.

Peace.

[archie4oz]

SCSI Hardware RAID controllers have become quite a rarity these days. And most who do video professionally will shell out for an Xserve RAID. Other options include external FireWire 800 RAID enclosures, or a NAS sitting on GigE.

IMO since you're talking mostly video, 15K SAS IMO are probably spending way too much for application tasks that don't require it.

[suryad]

I am not all too familiar with hdds other than SATA...but isnt SAS the replacement for SCSI now? I got the idea for the hard drive setup from Arstechnica's God Box guide section. I figured for processing tons of HD footage from a Canon XL H1 and the Sony Z1 should be grounds for that kind of hard drive speed. That is where the benefit of using Windows comes into play...you can get darn near any high end hardware you want whereas OS X does not seem to be like that.

I am considering an Xserver RAID but I dont think we are at that point yet...right now we have a 3 TB hard drive enclosure sitting on GigE. The thing is we are more familiar with say Adobe's video editing suite, and Avid than we are using Final Cut Pro. This machine will more likely server 2 purposes...my speed freak side...and also usage in video editing and post production.

On the vid card side, I was looking at the workstation class Nvidia cards but so far I have not seen any indication of them being supported by OS X...

[archie4oz]

SAS is a replacement for the traditional SCSI parallel implementations (plus is support SATA). 15K drives are a waste of money for video work. Once you get over a certain number of drives you're limited to I/O of the bridging protocol (SATA, SAS, GigE, FC-AL, etc.) 15K drives buy you great random access performance at the cost of storage density (expecially $/GB), and with HD it kinda sucks with the largest SAS drive being 147GB. Video you don't need that, you need more throughput and high storage density (particularly with HD).

As for Windows, do you mean on a general PC or Windows on a Mac Pro?

Seeing as you already have a 3TB NAS, how is your current performance with it? Are you already having performance issues with it (with HD projects?)? Pretty much most FCP guys I know that are serious tend to pick up Xserve RAIDs and use Fiber-Channel.

As for being more familiar with Adobe solutions, I would get a Mac Pro for Adobe solutions (although supposedly Adobe is going to be bringing back a nice UB version of Premier for OS X soon). If you're comfortable with Avid then you can use Avid Media Composer on OS X, although I'm more of an FCP person myself.

On the vid card side, I was looking at the workstation class Nvidia cards but so far I have not seen any indication of them being supported by OS X...

OK you lost me on thise one, Apple offers a Quadro 4500FX on the Mac Pros...

[DemoCoder]

The Mac Pro comes with builtin RAID, but moreover, Leopard will come with ZFS which obsoletes hardware RAID (in fact, HW RAID slows down ZFS if you try to run it on top) Under Leopard, people will want to buy as many cheap disks as possible, since that maximizes performance under ZFS RAIDZ.

[suryad]

Thanks for the replies guys. I am learning more and more with each post yall write.

To archie:
Thanks for the explanation. I am gonna scratch the idea of that hard drive setup. And yeah my bad...I forgot all about the Nvidia 4500!!

To democoder:
Thanks for the info. Didnt know that the Macpro came with builtin RAID. Is that software raid or hardware do you know? And no I Dont know about ZFS slowig down with HW RAID. Cool stuff!!!

So my decision so far is...wait for octa core Mac...wait for better gpu for Mac Pro and wait for Leopard before taking the plunge...sound about right?