SSD RAID M.2 For Flame on Imac Pro 2019

Flame Hardware Questions
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Hello :slight_smile:

First of all thank you so much, I’ve learned a lot from you guys.
I was often reading your comment, now it’s time for my first question on the forum.

I have a technical question about Framestore and disk speed.
I thought the forum was the best place to find an answer.

In my job we are currently working on iMac Pro and we are using promise Framestore with 8 disk in.
( we don’t have Linux because look a bit complicated to setup and there is no expert in the team )

For future upgrade we want to reduce size of the framestore and improve disk speed. ( because sometime we move station to work from Home )

We found a solution from OWC.
The idea is to use a raid of 4 SSD m.2 with good random write and thunderbolt 3.

Here is the link for the SSD AND FRAMESTORE :

OWC : OWC Express 4M2

Screenshot 2022-07-19 at 16.33.46
Screenshot 2022-07-19 at 16.33.462400×1226 212 KB

SSD : https://www.amazon.fr/Kingston-KC3000-PCIe-4-0-NVMe/dp/B09K7DRMSC/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3AXCKE8OP0424&keywords=kingston%2Bkc3000%2Bpcie%2B4.0%2Bnvme%2Bm.2%2Bssd&qid=1658241302&sprefix=Kingston%2BKC%2B3000%2Caps%2C53&sr=8-2&th=1

So my question is,

Do you think it’s going to work well with the Flame ?
Do you have anything else to suggest ?

I’m really interested to know more about your though or idea.

Thank you for your time.

Jérémy, Flamist from France :slight_smile:

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I’ve got two of those enclosures that I use as framestores on my imac pro. They work great. Never had a problem with them.

Mike

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3

Welcome!

Macsales has great service and provides good quality gear for flame. Definitely a good product for what you are after.

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4

I’ve got one of these set up as Raid 10. Getting 1337 (nice) MB/s write and 2259 MB/s read according to Black Magic Disk Speed test.

The only thing I’d point out, and it’s a minor thing, is the power supply is about as big as the unit itself.

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I’ve been using this as my framestore for over two years now on my iMac. Great product. And I upgraded from a Promise as well. Never looking back.

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Thank you for your feedback !!
We will purchase them soon :slight_smile:

Do you suggest any good SSD M2 ?

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I have WD Black 750 1tb drives in mine. I can’t say I did a ton of research on the matter.

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I got WD Blue SN550. With Raid 0 I get 2400MB/s read/write.

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On Amazon US you can read my review of this enclosure. Short answer is that the hardware works great. I would avoid using SoftRaid.

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10

What do you use to RAID up the SSD’s. Does this unit have a hardware raid controller?

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I stripe them in Apple Disk Utility.

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Hi Sam

Would you mind going in to more detail about this? I have a OWC ThunderBay 4 mini as a project drive, and I don’t get nearly the same speed from it in Flame as I do from the Blackmagic speed test. Never really figured out why. Just wondering if it’s SoftRaid not playing nicely with Flame.

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Hey Rufus,
I’m away from a mac for the week, so this will be brief and unverified.

  1. Back up your Thunderbay disk.
  2. Go to Apple Disk Utility.
  3. Create a raid of the 4 disks. Note carefully the ‘sector’ size that you choose in a spreadsheet.
  4. Name it exactly as it had been before. Restore you Autodesk Managed Media folder.
  5. Test the speed of the disks with BM, Aja, and in Flame, under the preference:storage tab. Note the speeds.
  6. Destroy the Raid in Apple Disk Utility and make it with the next larger sector size.
  7. repeat steps 2-6 until you’ve exhausted all possibilities, and noted all results.
  8. Choose the smallest sector size that gives the best balance of results. Smaller is more efficient use of the disk space for small files.

Fast is good.
I remember 256k sector size being excellent with Samsung drives. YMMV.
Generally Autodesk will be the fastest!

Good luck!
SE

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FYI I’ve never seen any consistency between Flame’s Test Disk and Blackmagic’s tool.

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