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Mercury Elite AL pro or wait for Thunderbolt?

D

Dr Strangelove

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 24, 2008
205
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http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/

I have the drives but looking for an enclosure to do some video editing on my 2011 iMAC with. Right now I edit AVCHD 720/1080 in Final Cut. Would I be a fool to pull the trigger on this enclosure now. How far off are we from Thunderbolt enclosures arriving?

And I guess the most important question is, does my current workflow even need Thunderbolt or is FW800 enough?
 
martinX said:
Or use your internal drive. Even faster.
Click to expand...

he has an iMac... so no... always put your media/scratch on a separate drive from your OS.

the hoopla around Thunderbolt is for the video Pros that need bandwidth that exceeds FW800 and have multiple drive RAID configurations. It's also a simple connection for full video I/O on a MBP/iMac. There are a lot of applications at the higher end, but it doesn't appear to have much promise on the consumer/prosumer levels.
 
bigbossbmb said:
he has an iMac... so no... always put your media/scratch on a separate drive from your OS.

the hoopla around Thunderbolt is for the video Pros that need bandwidth that exceeds FW800 and have multiple drive RAID configurations. It's also a simple connection for full video I/O on a MBP/iMac. There are a lot of applications at the higher end, but it doesn't appear to have much promise on the consumer/prosumer levels.
Click to expand...
I actually think ThB will have it's greatest impact at the prosumer level. The iMac w/two ThB ports, for example, does things that up until recently only a Mac Pro could do. You can hang a fast RAID off one port, a video I/O connected to a broadcast monitor off the other and have a complete setup capable of onlining/finishing a show.


Lethal
 
I have been searching around for benchmarks to figure out what kind of bandwidth avchd saturates on the bus with little luck. I understand USB is around 40Mbps and fw800 is double but what does that really mean if I'm hanging a raid10 or raid5 enterprise array off of it?
 
Yeah, Lethal... I was thinking in terms of higher level peripherals. But I can see how that would effect the prosumer market by making higher end products usable on lower level (price-wise) computers. It is pretty amazing the horsepower Apple has packed into the newer iMacs.

1080i60 AVCHD after log and transfer to ProRes would be approx 18 MB/s IIRC. Hanging a RAID off of a FW800 port means that the port would be the bottleneck in disk I/O, however it might not be the bottleneck in your overall workflow (if your media won't fully saturate the port's max).
 
bigbossbmb said:
he has an iMac... so no... always put your media/scratch on a separate drive from your OS.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm going to have to probe this one...

What's the problem (in real life) with media/scratch on the same drive as the OS. Actually, I know what the problem is, but I think it's important to establish the approximate performance limits.

Imagine this 2011 iMac:
  • 8 GB RAM
  • FCP is the only app running
  • TM off
FCP will be using 3 or 4 GB of RAM. FCP will be pretty well loaded up in RAM - assuming you're not calling up things that use FCP as a host like FX Factory, Boris things etc - so not much will be pulled in from the HD (even if things do get called up, you're not performing a playback of your timeline at the same time anyway). The OS has 4 GB of RAM to play with so there shouldn't be any virtual memory swapping.

So at what point do you say "man, all my media needs to be on a separate disk because playback performance is suffering". Also, is their any conceivable scenario where you would be saying that and playback performance would be improved by using a FW800 disk (which has a practical limit of ~600 Mbps), as opposed to using your internal disk (which has a theoretical speed of 6Gbps or a practical one, from what I have read, of ~4.8 Gbps).

Apple measures IO performance by the number of concurrent streams (p.16 and 17) and I can get 4 or 5 HD AIC streams (about 100 Mbps per stream, the same-ish as ProRes LT) on my nearly 3 year old iMac - I can only imagine that a 2011 iMac would be doing much better.

Comments?
 
So reading that apple document it looks like prores lt would be sufficient for my needs and fw800 is plenty fast to handle even multiple camera angles?
 
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