Editing: thunderbolt vs. ethernet cable vs. Sata

Hey!

I currently own a Promise Pegasus R4 (RAID 1 configuration) connected to an iMac Mid 2011 via, of course, thunderbolt connection, and everything is great. Final Cut is really smooth while editing and playing videos from the DAS by Promise.

I was wondering if you can achieve the same performances with a NAS (I was looking at the Synology DS414 ).

My ideal setup would be a fast NAS with backup feature, so I don't have to buy other disks or a NAS just to store my clips and projects.

Since I am thinking about selling my iMac from 2011 to buy a new one while I can sell mine for a good price, I was wondering if I can sell my Pegasus R4 too. It would be nice to have a unit I can connect over the ethernet, so other computers can access my files without powering on my Mac and share through it.

Thunderbolt seems the best solution, but is it possibile to achieve good performances with an ethernet connection? I edit AVCHD 1080p50 files and GoPro Hero 3+ 2.7K footage.

What's your experience?

Edit: since I have to connect multiple computers (Windows and Mac) it seems I have to format the NAS with a compatible system for them all. Is that correct? I think HFS+ is faster for Mac OS X.

Edit (2): now the topic discuss the Sata connections too

Eithernet won't compare to T'bolt at all. Fibre network will work for "edit in place", but Ethernet won't hold up. FCPX won't edit off of a Windows formatted drive.

We run a large-ish centralized NAS. It's a server/RAID-5 all in one from a vendor that specializes in video (ProMax if you're interested). This one happens to run on Windows Server 8, and the RAID itself is formatted in NTFS. As far as I know, our edit bays are connected through SMB2. There are other turn-key systems out there that even run on modified Linux, and they are mostly Ethernet-based. If you try to "roll your own" system, it will be cheaper, but you may run into some issues and will have to support it yourself.

In general the system runs 10 GbE over fibre lines, but we also run a few stations through a simple 1 Gb switch. In general 1 GbE is not that bad at all if you're doing HD ProRes or working with proxies. Totally doable, and in fact we've had some overflow freelancers on those lines as well as an AE, and it's fine. I would be a little worried about the 2.7k footage, but it's probably also H264, so it's not super disk-bandwidth intensive. You can actually just try this out yourself by connecting two macs through an ethernet cable and testing the footage through that connection. 1 GbE of course is way slower than Thunderbolt, but 10 GbE is very comparable to Thunderbolt 1.

The only real limitation is that you can't run a library off the NAS (there are workarounds to put them in a sparse bundle, or some people have had success with connecting through NFS). But because of the way FCPX constantly updates the library, you will want to run them locally anyway if you have many bays working at once.

THANK you so much for your reply!

What about internal storage? Having, for example, an SSD for the OS X and one hard drive to store the clips is a good solution? Is Sata enough to work on clips?
I would like to know if we are bond to Thunderbolt technology since we can't upgrade Mac Pros and iMacs with multiple internal storage.

About the GoPro clips: 2.7K is probably easier to handle compared to 2.5K Blackmagic clips.

If you've got your RAID, aren't you already putting your media on there? Even when we were using the old Mac Pro towers, almost no one would run media off of the internal drives (or you would only do it temporarily). As far as SATA, I've used it here and there with hackintoshes and the speed was pretty good, which is better than FW800. They're not terribly common in the mac world, although could get SATA cards on the old mac pros.

Your choices are USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt, and you can also go firewire with an adapter. You can also get a Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure and put PCIe cards on there, but you wouldn't do this unless you had specific needs like putting a 10GbE card on there or something like that. There are a lot of options for expandability with Thunderbolt.

Hey Haysoos123,

I was asking about the Sata connections because a friend of mine is building a hackintosh and he's thinking about using internal storage to edit clips (using SSD as a main drive for OS X and software plus an hard disk for the clips ). He is also willing to test Raid 0 with internal hard drives.

Good to know that is a nice solution. Too bad it's not available to Mac users because you can save some money if you don't want to use thunderbolt connections.

You have been very helpful. I thank you so much!

Hey Andy,
I think the place to start is always evaluate throughput requirements, then match the storage I/O to your needs. Larry Jordan has a fairly good article on this… www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/2559
I think he misses at a couple of points, but it is a good starting point for reference.
The fastest Ethernet is 1000gbs or 1GB. Watch out for little b (bits) vs Big B (Bytes).
You can set up RAIDs in older MacPro towers, but the fastest SATA ports were SATA II (3Gbs) per port. This is fine for hdds but ssd raids can max them out. There was some limitations on PCIe lanes as well. A newer Hackintosh will provide faster I/O motherboard and more PCIe lanes if using a Haswell CPU.
USB3 (coming soon USB3.1) that uses UASProtocol can give very high throughput and be more cross OS compatible, so you might want to give that some consideration. Just make sure to not use the older BOT protocol. USB3.1 looks very promising.
TB2 is very good and it takes lots of hdds(SATAIII) to saturate the bus, or about 5 ssds in RAID 0. This comes at a significant $$$. TB2 ~ = 4PCIe lanes speed.
Now of course there are PCIe2&3 based flash drives that bypass the SATA bottlenecks and can exceed TB speeds.
Decide how much throughput speed you need vs the amount of $$$ you are willing to spend. Of course you can always use proxies to edit.
Hope this helps, Greg

Hey Greg!
You always help me

I work really well with my iMac and the Promise Pegasus. I only wish I could upgrade my graphic card every 2 - 3 years and install other drives to run Windows and use an SSD for my OS. I feel a little bit stuck sometimes.

I wait to see Hackintosh performances with Sata. I think it can work well. I don't know if it will work better, but the hardware is better than mine (new i7, an SSD for the OS, a GTX 770 2GB instead of the HD6770M 512MB, and so on).

Today I prepared an old computer to run FreeNAS and it's serving me well, so I can leave Promise Pegasus some free space and backup my clips and projects

Which computer do you use for your work?

Thank you for the link, I'll study it very soon