Workflow and Thunderbolt Harddisk

I have a iMac 27-inch late 2012
Processor 3,4 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2048 MB
Internal hard disk: 3 TB

What happened is that there is something wrong with my internal hard disk. I have to back up the disc and reformat it as soon as possible.

So far my editing workflow has been with my internal hard disk. But I have been told that I should have an external hard disk when I work with video editing. Is it true that I should have all the video files in the external hard disk when you work with video?

Now I am looking for a good thunderbolt hard disk. Im also thinking about buying a 4k camera soon. For me it´s a bit confusing about which thunderbolt disc i should buy.

Is there anyone who got some tips?

Yes this is true, you want all your media... in fact any media on a external drive.
Reason for this is incase your OS drive or even your workstation goes bye bye your project files are still good. On top of that you will have a speed boost and less wear and tear all around. Well depending on the hardware.

Which to get depends on budget and demand.
I like to use a G-Raid for a Scratch drive, Pegasus2 Series and Caldigit T3 for a archival and production drive.

Flyfisher Film wrote: ...So far my editing workflow has been with my internal hard disk. But I have been told that I should have an external hard disk when I work with video editing. Is it true that I should have all the video files in the external hard disk when you work with video?...Now I am looking for a good thunderbolt hard disk....

It's generally good advice to have your media files on a separate hard drive than your system drive. That said, if the system drive is fast (say SSD or Fusion Drive) moving 1080p media to an external drive may not yield a dramatic overall performance improvement.

Faster I/O only improves overall performance if I/O was the bottleneck. People often make expensive purchases speculatively assuming that faster I/O yields faster performance. In fact many activities on FCP X are CPU or GPU bound. Editing single-stream H.264 1080p video doesn't take much I/O performance.

That said, 4k takes a lot more and if you ever edit multicam or multiple streams it takes even more. It's only common sense to distribute the I/O load. If your boot drive is not SSD nor Fusion Drive, a single 7200 rpm drive doesn't have that much extra I/O performance anyway.

The Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID products are very good, but somewhat expensive. G-Raid is less expensive and pretty good, but not as fast. Whatever external drive you get should itself be backed up, even if it's RAID 5.

If so inclined you can measure whether there's an I/O bottleneck using the Terminal command iopending. The I/O histogram can be examined using the command bitesize.d. E.g, "sudo iopending", and "sudo bitesize.d". Google for more details.

Reading the previous post the drives only come in Thunderbolt and benefit from it.

If your projects a short a G-Tech should be fine. I can't say mich for the Cal Digit I haven't received enough feedback in the hardware forum .

Thanks for many good advices. Is there someone who can help me to make a decision?

G-Technology 8TB G-RAID Studio External Storage System with Thunderbolt 2
www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1048667-R...lt.html/prm/alsVwDtl

This is a Thunderbolt 2 but if I have understood it Right? Thunderbolt 2 can also be used as thunderbolt 1? Maybe it´s stupid to buy thunderbolt 2 when I don't have it on my computer, but maybe in the future I have another computer and then I don´t need to buy thunderbolt 2? Do I have a point? It seems like the price is ok?

G-Technology 8TB G-RAID External Hard Drive Array with Thunderbolt
www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/858463-RE...D_External_Hard.html

It seems like the users is very happy with this one

Sometimes its difficult to make a decision.

I have the 2nd one -- the G-Raid 8TB Thunderbolt 1. I use it in RAID 0 to back up via Time Machine my iMac and 8TB Promise Pegasus in RAID 5. I also back the R4 up separately to another detached Thunderbolt drive using Carbon Copy, and periodically to a 4TB USB 3.0 drive.

The G-Raid is a good unit. I like it because it sits flat on top of my R4 and the color mostly matches. It's not as fast as the R4 but it costs 1/2 as much. Also the R4 can tolerate a drive failure due to RAID 5 whereas a single drive failure on the G-Raid in RAID 0 will compromise all data on both drives. You can run the G-Raid in RAID 1 but that cuts capacity to 50% and hurts some types of performance.

In the past I ran my main media on two-drive RAID 0. It's a little risky IMO but if you have good backups I guess it's OK. It's the cheapest way to get good performance. I'd estimate over the years I probably averaged about a drive failure every two years, which of course required recovering from backups. I always had good backups so didn't lose anything.

However I got tired of "living dangerously", plus the downtime of recovering from backups. I like the Pegasus R4 a lot better. It's very fast on both reads and writes, quiet and can tolerate single-drive failure. Of course it costs more.

FCPGuy wrote: Reading the previous post the drives only come in Thunderbolt and benefit from it.

If your projects a short a G-Tech should be fine. I can't say mich for the Cal Digit I haven't received enough feedback in the hardware forum .

I don't have to much experience with the drives from Caldigit but I'em aware that the T3 (Thunderbolt with three drives) has a Softraid controller. So keep in mind it will take CPU resources when using it.

So CalDigit is not worth the money then. I think I will pass on them.

The T3 is a software RAID, not hardware? Are you sure? I'd like to verify this if it is documented somewhere. That's pretty important to know about a self-contained RAID enclosure.

I have found this review with the following:

Even better, with the upcoming release of SoftRAID 5, users will be able to optionally configure the T3 as RAID 5, providing a mix of performance, capacity, and security, something that’s not possible with just two drives.

Also here ...

I'em guessing this is what he means.

"Unfortunately, because the T3 lacks a hardware RAID controller, options for setup are limited."

Wow, really? Someone puts out a RAID enclosure without a RAID controller card in it? What's the point? Ugh...

I would't say you are limited with a software RAID. Software RAID also has many Pros to hardware RAID.
For my upcoming project I decided to use Caldigit hardware from production, post and archive.

I will be happy to share my experience if anybody cares?

Scrubelicious wrote: I would't say you are limited with a software RAID. Software RAID also has many Pros to hardware RAID. For my upcoming project I decided to use Caldigit hardware from production, post and archive. I will be happy to share my experience if anybody cares?

The Caldigit T4R (comparable to Pegasus R4) is not yet available yet. Do you know the price?

The T3 is software RAID only, which for RAID5 would require SoftRAID.com. Traditionally software RAID has been looked down on as less capable, less reliable and incurring higher overhead than hardware RAID. However CPUs are much faster now so this somewhat mitigates the speed issue, esp. on RAID0 and RAID1.

Another issue is reliability in an uncontrolled halt, whether due to power failure, OS hang, etc. Hardware RAID controllers usually have on-board battery backup which ensures data is flushed to disk whether power fails or OS crashes. For software RAID you can have the entire system on a battery backup, but this doesn't handle software failures.

On RAID5 the parity writes will typically cause a significant performance loss unless done by hardware RAID. Reads are usually not affected. It would be very interesting to compare a 4-drive RAID5 config using software RAID like the Caldigit T4R or OWC Thunderbay IV/4 to a similar 4-drive RAID5 Promise Pegasus R4 which uses hardware RAID.

The Thunderbay IV/4 was tested by diglloyd, who got pretty good performance using 4 physical drives in software RAID5. So maybe even software RAID5 isn't that slow anymore on writes: macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-OWC-Thunderbay.html

However the Thunderbay 4 diskless chassis is $579: eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20...-l2iPTFL8aAtJ-8P8HAQ

I can't find a comparable price for a Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt 2 diskless chassis, but the R4 Thunderbolt 1 diskless chassis was about $679.

The R4 Thunderbolt 2 with 4x2TB drives is $1,299:

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item...08rCCLruAaAnXs8P8HAQ

So it is a tough decision. No good 3rd party tests on the Caldigit T4R yet, OWC Thunderbay 4 looks good in RAID 5 despite being software RAID, yet it may not be that much cheaper than the Pegasus R4 which uses hardware RAID.

I currently use an 8TB Pegasus R4 in RAID5. I have personally hot-swapped drives during heavy I/O and it kept running OK, then rebuilt the failed drive when a new one was inserted. The R4 has never lost any data despite several OS X crashes. For any software RAID5 product to satisfy me, it would have to repeatedly pass these tests.

That said I also use Apple software RAID0 on a Thunderbolt 8TB G-Tech G-Raid, and it has also given good performance and never lost any data. It is not as fast as the Pegasus R4 in RAID5, but it's a lot cheaper.

Yes this is true, but isn't the CalDigit T3 (RAID 0, 1 and JBOD) in the same sector as the G-RAID Studio? Except it has extra drive for more flexibility.
I'em not even sure if the Pegasus even have a "on-board battery backup". I haven't found any documentation but I will take a close look when I get back in the cave tomorrow.

After having years experience with Promise and G-Technology I finally decided to go give CalDigit a try.
Not to big a fan of G-Technology new Studio design.

For my setup, I choose two AV Pro for Data managing and lookup archives, two T3 (RAID 0) for scratching and one T4 (RAID 5) Data storing.

I will see how well they will perform.

Raymond,
You don't mention back-up drives. BU at least 2X to different drives.
I prefer to use external drives as media storage.
If you have other programs running in background they can also use up ram and bandwidth.
Thunderbolt 2 is backwards compatible with TB1, just runs @TB1 speeds. TB1 isn't necessarily a slouch, but if you are looking at 4K(5K&up) multi-cam, then good future proofing.
Software RAID 1&0 there is very little additional processing hit on the CPU. RAID 5 does add a processing hit.
Hardware RAID moves the processing to the chips on the external drive unit. On thing to keep in mind, if you have a hardware failure the only way to recover the data is by having an identical empty drive with the same firmware. Then you can swap out the drives and continue. If you don't have the exact same bare box, your data will most likely be lost, or you will have to send it out for recovery. Some of the drive manufactures do not allow you to swap drives under warranty nor even sell bare units.
With software RAID, if you have a failure, you can normally just swap out your drives into a working device and good to go as it is controlled by software. This is true no matter what version of RAID. RAID 5 is not natively supported by Apple and you must buy Softraid to create a software based RAID 5. Only program I know of.
Hope this helps, Greg

Scrubelicious wrote: ...I'em not even sure if the Pegasus even have a "on-board battery backup"...After having years experience with Promise and G-Technology I finally decided to go give CalDigit a try...

The Pegasus R-series definitely has internal battery backup for the cache. I verified this with Promise tech support. This doesn't totally eliminate the need for an external UPS, which is generally a good idea anyway. However it may enable modified cache data being written to the HDD if the host computer crashes or locks up.

Please post your experience with the CalDigit unit.

joema wrote: ...It would be very interesting to compare a 4-drive RAID5 config using software RAID like the Caldigit T4R or OWC Thunderbay IV/4 to a similar 4-drive RAID5 Promise Pegasus R4 which uses hardware RAID...

We have now done this over on Mac Forums. Our preliminary tests show the Thunderbay 4 using SoftRAID-5 is competitive performance-wise with an 8TB Pegasus R4 in RAID-5. It also appears the RAID creation and rebuild performance of the Thunderbay is a lot faster, but our testing has been limited:

forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=20350166#post20350166

So maybe the traditional view that hardware RAID-5 is always superior may no longer be correct in all cases.

Note these tests are casual, not scientific, did not examine host CPU load, nor exactly match characteristics of individual drives in the array. However Mac Performance Guide did extensive testing on the Thunderbay 4 + SoftRAID combo, and got good results: macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-OWC-Thunderbay.html

So far I can say the CalDigit T3 is quick compared to the G-Technology G-Raid.
Noise level you can hear the fan from the T3 but the G-Raid is loud in general.. combination of vibration, hard drive and fan noise.

Attached are two simple speed tests

CalDigit T3



G-Technology G-Raid 4TB


Promise Pegasus R6 12TB


Promise Pegasus R6 6TB