Need lots of FAST storage for editing?

Have you got some cash burning a hole in your pocket, and want to step up your editing storage?

Check this out! DIY RAID for editing 4k footage. A whopping 1700Mbps throughput!

The article covers building a 16TB external RAID enclosure.. but at current drive prices you could easily double that amount of storage for about the same cost. I just picked up three 2TB drives for my hackintosh build last weekend for $99 apiece.


Anyway, here's the article.. enjoy!
http://blog.iamfilmguy.com/2013/06/how-to-build-diy-4k-raid.html
 
Yeah, it's definitely an ambitious project. More than I'd want to take on any time soon.. maybe some day.

For now, I think I'll be set for a while with the much more simple internal 6TB RAID0 solution I included in my new hackintosh. It's only getting in the neighborhood of 400Mpbs throughput, not the insane 1700 of this thing, but that's still more than enough for HD, and should work for 2k (depending on the codec)
 
is your hdd/ssd speed more or as important as the rest of the specs (good ram/cpu/mb) ? I've recently upgraded to an SSD (not the fastest one on the market) and didn't really notice a huge jump. A friend recommended I try RAID.

Currently I'm running an SSD with a 4GB RamDisk as a scratch.
 
Editing on SSD isn't a great idea. SSD's have a finite number of read/write cycles, if you're doing lots of reading/writing from/to SSD you'll burn it out well before when it should actually give out.

If you want FAST, then RAID0 is the best option. But yes, all the other specs are important too.. if you're trying to edit 4k footage on an underpowered machine the bottleneck is probably the CPU and/or RAM.

Most NLEs will leverage your GPU for processing these days too, at least for some elements, so having a good video card is also a good idea.

To give you a glimpse, my current post prod machine has the following:
intel i7 4770k 3.2Ghz quad core (overclocked to 3.9GHz)
32GB ram
SSD system disk
8TB RAID0 array for editing
GTX 760FTW 4gb gpu

I can edit 4k in realtime, but it'll start to bog down in resolve with 4k after adding several correction nodes to a clip, that is primarily due to the GPU, and it's a pretty darn good gpu.

My read/write speeds from the RAID array are around 520MB/s
 
Incidentally, the external raid system mentioned in the first post... I'll be building something like it over the next year ramping up for shooting a feature at some point a year or so from now in 4k. Did the math yesterday, at a 10:1 shooting ratio, footage for a 2hr feature shot in 4k raw will occupy about 20 terabytes. :lol:
 
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