Fastest Way to Shuttle Files to Server From Two Video Stations

Do your editing stations have ethernet? Specifically Gigabit speed? Apple computers, afaik, use Gigabit speed ethernet if they have an ethernet port.

You will likely need Gigabit speed router/switch/hub as well to hook up devices to each other. These are bit more expensive than the usual consumer level - but the consumer level routers/switch/hubs run at 1/10 the speed.

Please forgive the vagueness of the terms used, but it's been a while since I researched this for my own needs. I got what I needed, and then decided I needed the room in my brain for other things... but.... I am photographer that deals in files that are sometimes 1 or 2 GB in size. Transferring across my network is measured in seconds.

It was dead easy to set up. Ethernet cable is cheap. Good Cat5 is usually good enough, but you may need Cat5E. Cable lengths can be long, so you have flexibility on where you physically locate your stations.

If all your systems are Macs, you can use Screen Sharing across the network... for instance, you don't know what the file is called and you don't want to get up and look at the station? You can Screen Share to the other station and fire up the application and look at the Recent Files.... for example.

If you go this route get better advice than I can give... but if I can set it up I'm sure you can. It has also been rock solid for me.

ShMac said:

We need to shuttle files of about 4GB from our two video editing stations
to a playing device such as a Mac Mini. We are open to all kinds of possibilities.

Is it possible to use a hub and connect the two stations to one player computer using thunderbolt and a hub?

Possible with FireWire 800?

What is the best option?

Click to expand...

Fire wire tops out at 100Mb/s (but usually more like 80Mb/s).

Gigabit Ethernet tops at a 125Mb/s (but usually more like 100Mb/s).

Technically going with 10gb would be faster (which your editing stations may have or could be added), but the ethernet on the mini would be your bottleneck. I haven't seen any thunderbolt to 10gb "dongles" yet. You could theoretically go with 2 - 1GB ports by using the Mini's onboard NIC and adding one of the $29 Apple Thunderbolt GB ports. That would give you a max of about 250Mb/s. That's called Link Aggregation.

Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

Apple: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11019

Caveat here though, you won't get even gigabit speeds if you just use mechanical hard drives (especially not the slow 2.5" mechanical drives found in the Mini). To truly max out all of the speed, you will need Solid State Drives or a RAID arrays. Further, you will only be able to use the HDMI port for video connection if you use the Apple Thunderbolt to Ethernet dongle. This might be what you had planned all along, but I thought it worth mentioning.

ShMac said:

So, with Gigabit ethernet, a quality cable, we would be approximately looking at 4,000MB/100Mbsec=4000MB/12.5MBsec=320 seconds?

5.3 minutes is too long!

This sucks, we have the budget for whatever but I suppose there is no faster solution for Apple machines (

Click to expand...

125 MBytes/sec (in theory) so 32 seconds. A little longer in practice.

New Minis have the Gigabit connection - which is also called 1000Base-T, while most consumer devices are 100Base-T - and TB. Current Mac Pros each have two Gigabit ethernet connections.

For the record iMacs appear to have both Gigabit ethernet and TB as well.

snberk103 said:

125 MBytes/sec (in theory) so 32 seconds. A little longer in practice.

New Minis have the Gigabit connection - which is also called 1000Base-T, while most consumer devices are 100Base-T - and TB. Current Mac Pros each have two Gigabit ethernet connections.

For the record iMacs appear to have both Gigabit ethernet and TB as well.

Click to expand...

Yep and with link aggregation of two gigabit adapters that would cut it to about 20 seconds (theoretically).....

Another idea

So, the statement was the FASTEST - right?

Then wouldn't that be a fiber channel connection? That would be a 4GB connection and using FC over thunderbolt (8 sec), you could offload all of the storage to a SAN.

Just a thought. Then you could buy laptops

Tim