Community > General chatter
Technology
Setsuna:
And in the 'While I was out' category, I nabbed an 8 port SAS controller since a friend was handed(!) one for free, and it didn't suit his purposes (He's having a SATA 6.0 problem with some his SSDs because his mainboard made 2 of the 4 SATA ports use just 1 PCI-e lane, crimping the write performance of 2 of his 4 512GB SSDs, and his work handed him a redundant one to see if it'd fix his problem. Unfortunately, the controller's not that great with SATA or at least with SSDs, but it's fully functional otherwise), so it was handed to me(!!) after confirming it wasn't useful to him, because he knows I can really use it.
He did get to borrow my broadcastable Vita though (he's on youtube as ZedameX, and I pretty much taught him how to get video of all his devices, as well as provide significant hardware acquisition advice) so I imagine he'll be using it to do some video recordings of some games with his larger PSVita collection, and he wants to do more work with my VitaTV, and I've got to help him find a suitable controller for his drives anyway, so it's more of a technical trade for the card.
For those who know anything about the equipment being talked about, you'd probably know how happy I am right now. (And why the !s exist.)
For those who don't know what it is though, the SAS controller is a card you put into a computer, and you use to load up SAS drives... Well, to be honest, they're actually designed for servers and heavy duty workstations.
For those who don't know what SAS drives are (or can be at least, they're graded like all drives), they're enterprise grade drives which (if you own the right ones of course) can write 200-300MB/s sustained (under SAS 6.0Gb/s, and generally controllers will limit you to about 1800MB/s sustained write per controller) until the very last byte due to the fact SAS uses a protocol (NCQ off the top of my head) which basically allows you to throw stupid amounts of data at a drive (or RAID usually) and have it write pretty much non stop.
The drives can be very expensive, and bigger ones (600-1TB) can set you 600 or much, much more and that's just at SAS 6gb/s. I heard a 1.5TB top of the line (12Gb/s) one will set you back 11000 per drive and will in a set of 4 or more will beat an equivalent number of SSDs in the read/write category in RAID). No that's not a typo.
Now you ask, why don't I just get SSDs instead? They're a lot cheaper and some of the newer ones can write at 300+MB/s, and more importantly, don't require special hardware to put into a computer.
Your average SSD has a lifespan of roughly 400000 write cycles +/-10% before the NAND wears out and you need a new drive.
Your average SAS? It has a lifespan of 100000 hours (under warranty) with full load and usually last +/-50%. Some of the older ones are in the vicinity of 7-10 years old, and still going, and this is older tech.
I've got a stack of 5 drives not in use (4x 87GBs, and 1x450GB, all rated at 15k rpm and are SAS 6gb/s) since 4 of them are currently used right now and is what drives my recording work.
The controller itself is probably worth 1000, since it came from a production server.
... And it's now mine to use as I see fit, as it was released to me at no cost. I'm thinking of JBODing it, and clocking somewhere in the vicinity of about 1GB/s write.
It's probably not that exciting unless you know how I record video (Think 'Always record at the highest possible quality, then scale down to suit' taken to the logical extreme, namely, I record pixel perfect raw footage every time, and know my ultimate goal to record 4k footage requires about 1000MB/s write sustained).
... That and let's face it, sometimes it's just a lot of fun playing around with powers way beyond a consumer level.
For those who need me, I will be away drooling working on installing this precious item. I'll need more connectors for a start...
Accoun:
Well... can't say anything more than "wow". :-P
Although I'm curious what would you record at 4K and at what FPS. I assume you have (or at least you're going to have) a grabber working at that resolution? Not sure about the consumer hardware, but there probably are professional solutions already, and I'd guess it's too much of a strain to record via software. Although someone on GAF managed to run DMC4 at 8K/60 FPS, so maybe it would be possible to record it at 4K and the game itself didn't look that bad from what I remember.
Unless you're just talking about some unidentifiable future. ;-)
Setsuna:
--- Quote from: Accoun on June 28, 2014, 07:27:28 pm ---Well... can't say anything more than "wow". :-P
Although I'm curious what would you record at 4K and at what FPS. I assume you have (or at least you're going to have) a grabber working at that resolution? Not sure about the consumer hardware, but there probably are professional solutions already, and I'd guess it's too much of a strain to record via software. Although someone on GAF managed to run DMC4 at 8K/60 FPS, so maybe it would be possible to record it at 4K and the game itself didn't look that bad from what I remember.
Unless you're just talking about some unidentifiable future. ;-)
--- End quote ---
I have the ingest card to do so (A Blackmagic Decklink Extreme 3D) so it's not a theoritical. I also have the ability to record 3D, although I don't have any interest in that.
Essentially, if I can see it and convert the video format to a standard TV format, I can record it.
Installing the card and reconfiguring the system is going to take me a while (I need to get two sets of a particular breakout cable), and configuration burn in is projected to take a week.
animagic4u:
Anyone have a recommendation for good headphones for Jazz and Acoustic music? Anything under $200 is fair game.
altuixde:
Are you going to be listening to the headphones tethered to a computer or are you going to be walking around listening to them? One of my headphones has way too much cable to be convenient for stuffing into a pocket. The second pair of headphones I use is discontinued. The third is just a pair of Apple EarPods. I have more than three kinds of headphones but those are the three that I actually use. I'm actually going to be ordering a new pair of headphones myself (these). I'll post my impressions of them here. It'll take a few days for them to arrive, though.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version