Summary:
With the right interface card, Medea’s top-of-the-line VideoRaid 10/2000 FCR2X fibre channel RAID array gives you all the throughput you need for several streams of HD video or multiple SD video streams. While its high sticker price is not for the meek, the FCR2X’s speed, scalability and reliability make it a great addition for small - to medium-sized post suites.
Target Apps:
Editing and visual effects post production
It’s a fact: high-resolution video requires a lot of space and very fast hard drive systems. Yet the fastest transfer speeds require fibre channel arrays, which initially were astronomically expensive. Medea, however, offers a solution to this problem with the VideoRaid 10/2000 FCR2X, an $7,799 fibre channel-based hard drive array that provides ultra-fast data transfer speeds.
For my tests, Medea provided me with the VideoRaid 10/2000 FCR2X, a dual-channel, 2 TB array. The VideoRaid 10/2000 FCR2X comes in a sleek and moderately quiet chassis, filling only three rack spaces. A brilliant stroke in the VideoRaid’s design is the inclusion of a four-port HUB. This will let you share the VideoRaid FCR2X with up to four workstations. As an added bonus, you can place the FCR2X up to 3,000 feet away using optical fibre cables without any loss in data speed.
In the studio, my colleagues and I used the VideoRaid 10/2000 FCR2X with the ATTO Celerity FC-22XH 2 Gb dual-channel fibre card, which worked on both our Mac and PC systems. Setup was amazingly simple. Instead of archaic RAID software utilities, you simply create RAID volumes using the RAID software built into Windows XP and Mac OS X.
But how does it perform? In two words: lightning fast.
Using Blackmagic Design’s speed test utility, we found that the VideoRaid 10/2000 FCR2X could support a write speed of 352 MBps, with a data read speed of 305 MBps. In real-world terms, this means you could easily play back two streams of 8-bit 1080i video, or about eight uncompressed SD video streams.
While its $7,799 price tag can be daunting, the Medea 10/2000 FCR2X is a professional RAID array that will give you all the storage muscle you need to create multi-layered SD or HD projects.
