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Filed under: Hardware •

CalDigit HDElement RAID Review

Performance

So now to the real question; how did the drives perform? Well first off, let me give you the numbers and then we will stack up those against real world improvements. I worked with several footage types, mainly RED .r3d files, XDCAM and Uncompressed 10bit. The Graph below lays out the differing HDD speeds on my system. My internal RAID is a three drive software RAID 0 on the internal controller of my Mac Pro, controlled by OS X.  I should note that all RAIDS were setup as RAID 0 to test top speeds, and are not indicative of sustained speeds over the life of the RAID.

As you can see, the CalDigit numbers are significantly better! Now before you run out and buy a brand new RAID, lets quickly evaluate what these numbers mean in terms of real world performance increase.

RAID = Better Performance…right?

Your performance is mainly going to depend on what codec you are working in. If your codec’s data rate is within the ability of one of these other RAIDs then you will probably not notice an increase in performance. For example, compressing or transcoding footage will be a very marginal increase because the real bottleneck there is the CPU cycles, not the hard drive speed. So the real performance difference you’ll notice in post-production comes in way of realtime performance when working with footage on the timeline, scrubbing and editing. Let’s face it; as editors the realtime factor is very important. And the reality is that unless you are working with Uncompressed footage or another bandwidth intensive codec, you probably won’t see that much of an increase with this CalDigit unit over say an internal software RAID like the one I have configured.

For example, I was able to get perfectly acceptable RT playback on my internal RAID on both ProRes HQ files and RED .r3d files. I’m talking about multiple streams of video for the type of post-work your average Joe The Editor will be doing. Essentially a system like the CalDigit, while definitely very nice, will potentially give you a lot of overhead performance that you potentially may never see the benefit of. That said, there will be some improvements along the way such as increased reliability…simply by virtue of the fact that you are now working off of a hardware RAID. But as I soon found out, not even the best hardware RAID is entirely immune from gremlins.

Problems

I ran into a few issues while editing on this CalDigit RAID over the 6 weeks I worked on it. On three different occasions the RAID crashed, leaving me in total fear of losing my project files. Each time it crashed it would lock my system up requiring me to pull the card out of my Mac Pro and go through a series of diagnostics to get it back up and running. Sometimes it was simple and sometimes it required calling CalDigit to get things sorted out. In general I found their customer service to be pretty reliable and quick. However on one of my more drastic crashes I was transferred to technical support, who was unable to pickup the phone, requiring instead I leave my contact information for a callback. Unfortunately that return call never happened, and I finally managed to reconnect two days later. While I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and accept that this is perhaps an exception to both to their product’s reliability and their technical support team performance, this does not instill a high level of confidence in me as a user.

Wrapup/Conclusions

The CalDigit is a very nice RAID. It certainly has all the bells and whistles and the performance numbers are definitely up there. However, that all comes at a cost, and the price tag definitely matches. The enclosure itself is around $2194.95 and the controller cards start at around $284.00 retail. The real question you need to ask is whether or not your current workflow demands that type of horsepower. If your answer is yes, then the CalDigit HDElement offers a substantial feature set and performance to match. If the answer is no, then perhaps the tradeoffs of a software driven RAID and associated cost savings may be just what you need. As with any area of our profession, it’s all about fitting the right tools to the right job. Happy editing!

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Kendal,

Did you happen to mention which size HDelement you were working with (2GB, 4GB, etc)? My apologies if I overlooked this.

Thanks for the valuable info.

Kevin

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/31  at  08:38 AM

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It was a 4x1GB HDDs. I also made CalDigit aware of the crashes at each step of the way. At this point I would just assume it was unique to my system but I cant say that conclusively. All I can say is what happened and pass that information along unfortunately I didn’t get any real conclusive information from CalDigit about the situation.

Posted by Kendal Miller  on  08/31  at  10:45 AM

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Seems to me there are better and less costly solutions on the market. I use the Sonnet Fusion 800. It has cost me € 1600 without the drives, so as a 8x1 TB system gives me 6TB RAID 5 protected storage for around € 2500. With it’s double E-SATA interface its blazing fast and it has not failed me one second since I installed the system a year ago.

Martijn

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/01  at  05:53 AM

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Thanks Kendal for the update.

I would hope that with a RAID system designed for the production world, that it would be hard to find one with system failures.

Maybe I’ll hold off on Caldigit for a while. My MacGuru raid has ran without a hiccup for over a year. (alas, it is not RAID 5, so I have to have another backup.) =\

Posted by Bryan Fowler  on  09/01  at  12:27 PM

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I agree crashing never instills a sense of confidence does it? Frankly that really surprised me from a vendor as well known as CalDigit.

Posted by Kendal Miller  on  09/01  at  01:09 PM

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Kendal,
Thanks for the report. I’m curious though. What happened with the battery you had to pull out to start the system? Did you put it back after it started or is your card working sans battery and thus forgetting its settings every now and then? Can that be the cause of the crashes?
Thanks

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/01  at  08:32 PM

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I put it back the first time it crashed. Subsequent calls to CalDigit gave me no other feedback so it stayed in for the duration of the testing.

Posted by Kendal Miller  on  09/01  at  08:37 PM

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Modern software requires ever-increasing amounts of disk space and free memory, leading to constant hard drive access both to retrieve data from the program directory and to store data in the ‘virtual memory’ space that Windows puts aside on the hard drive.
DVD Rentals by email

Posted by DVD Rentals by email  on  09/19  at  05:19 AM

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Perhaps policing of the comments is on order (DVD rental ad above)?

I am surprised by your internal Mac Pro RAID 0 speeds. We raided 2 and had over 200 MBps. Your internal RAID write of only 79 is slow.

I have a MBP with an eSATA card and with a single, bare external drive, I get performance better than 79 MBps.

Posted by IEBA  on  09/21  at  08:08 PM

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