Hi all,
I have project starting next week, +4min film at 4K, dpx ungraded.
Does anyone have a recommend for a relatively portable Raid? Preferably plug and play with Flame on Mac Studio, Sonoma.
many thanks,
Marcus
I’m running an OWC Thunderblade (on my MacStudio (Sonoma)) for Media Cache.. pretty much plug and play.. I’ve got it on Raid0 (apfs 64Kb gave me the best speed about 3GB/s) (but it’s being mirrored every night) .. Project files, rushes etc.. would live on my nas..
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If you want something portable the owc express 1m2 are really great! No power required as this is a plug and play with thunderbolt. It’ has 1x nvme slot, I have this configured with a 8tb nvme drive.
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DPX? Go EXRs and save a shite tone of space and bandwidth.
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I have various OWC raids and they’re great. Easy to set up, work v well and go forever. Don’t use the OWC RAID software though, just set the raid up with Apple Disk Utility
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As an alternative to RAID, run it all from a single NVME drive on an Acasis Thunderbolt 5 external enclosure. I’ve been running on a few of those on Mac Studios for 3 months now without any issues. Clone the drive if desired to another and with the new Flame project management it is easy to switch to the clone if you have an issue. The Acasis unit has a fan, has never throttled, and handles 4K DPX with no problems. They also make some RAID devices, but none with TB5 (which may be overkill). These are as portable as possible and are powered by the Mac.
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For your needs of 4k on your Mac Studio, a single NVMe bus-powered plug n play portable from OWC should be more than plenty.
I run quite a few of OWCs as framestores in raid configs as well as their single NVMe portables as external scratches, absolutely zero issues.
With the currently available bus speeds/NVMe combo, 4k (UHD and DCI) is not taxing on IO rates at all even with uncompressed configs. For instance, lets say your framestore’ top end is 3000 MB/s which is nothing these days, uncompressed 4k playback is a nonissue, with you having sufficient amount of headroom left.
And if you are running any of prores config flavors, up to 4444 XQ, you have even more headroom if your timelines are under 16bit.
With the 16bit timelines within prores 4444 XQ config, you still have sufficient amount of headroom for trustworthy 4k UHD/DCI playback of up to 30 fps with that same 3000 MB/s framestore.
I have been using a couple of OWC ThunderBlades (4 NVMes each) as two separate framestores. With sustained xfer rates (up to 2800 MB/s) they easily cover 4K (UHD + DCI) with uncompressed/raw config for 10bit to 16bit 2398 timelines and with plenty of headroom. For reference, I am always operating within the uncompressed/raw config unless a client specifically specifies to switch to prores and that’s a rarity.
I also use OWC Envoy (single NVMe) portable for all the project assets (cam raw, grades, gfx, offlines etc). And I have found this powerful little guy with plenty of data xfer rates (also up to 2800 MB/s) for me to forget about the fact that I am still working with uncached media. And sometimes I will be working/R&D’ing with non-debayered (live/debayer-on-the fly) cam raw clips with absolutely no lag or hiccups (granted that one of the gfx cards is pulling the weight of live on the fly debayer). So in theory, I can really use another one of these single NVMe portable drives as temp framestore if needed.
And the latest OWC plug n play single NVMe portables have even higher sustained xfer rates. So if you buy one today, and are not concerend about your framestore being raid 5 or 6 config, etc, you are totally fine with one of these single NVMe portables.
Good practice to run the Aja sys test app (or whatever app you prefer) on your framestore to check that the data rates are actually “sustained” and are without spikes, specially on the read side of things.
Aja app for instance shows a nice read/write graph after each test cycle where you can look for the spikes or the initial read slope (so as counter measure, for QC’ing you can add a few frames or seconds of some slug before the program begins, so by the time the first picture appears the slope is long gone.)
Since we do not have the system dominated/governed, ensured locked playback in flame anymore like we used to have many moons ago with the Stones, the “sustained” data read rate is all what we’ve got now for things like finessing/adjusting/verifying speed ramps, ease-offs or anims, etc as far as the framestore. RAM playback is another story.
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Concur. Also OWC raid software keeps asking for updating to their latest version by popups (which you can disable) each time they roll out a new one.
Due to fear of breaking other things, not a fan of updating support utilities unless necessary. I have made a mistake of updating OWC raid utility once, and somehow for some reason it took out my Aja IO and I had to reinstall the Aja utility.