Hey Guys,
Super informative blog, which I used to build my home 10GbE network without a switch. A little information on my setup. I use a work station to work station direct connection via Cat 6 to intel x540 T1 cards. One of my workstations is acting like a file server running windows 10. The other has the same chipset, same OS, processor and network card.
In the Workstation serving as a file server I have a LSI 9266-8i MegaRAID card. I have 2 raids created from this card. RAID0 consisting of 4 2TB WD Black drives, the other is RAID6 consisting of 4 6TB WD Black Drives.
I've commented about 6 months back on this article, and got a few responses back from Dennis on some troubleshooting scenarios, which really helped me out. He helped me get the performance out of my network. This has allowed me to start testing my system in application scenarios. I've run a few large projects using CDNG, Proxies (prores 444, and 422) and various other file formats to really test the platforms.
I've run into a few bottlneck/responsiveness issues, and I've run into a hardware glitch that I'm hoping your guys' experience can help me sort out. I'm a super user and builder, but no where near a professional when it comes to network engineering.
First, the hardware. I have an issue when I restart, or start after a full shut down on the File server machine. This happens about 75% of the time. When I start the machine up, my RAID card at post warns me that one or more drives are missing. I can restart and restart, and I'll get a 10% chance that it will start normal, but when I take the lid off my Roswill 4U 12 bay case, it's a 90% chance that all drives will be detected after a restart. Can anyone help me out with the reasoning for this? Everything is properly seated in the case, I've checked and triple checked cables, all LED on the outside light where there are Hard drives present, but yet, I get this often. I've even checked data cables to ensure they are all attached to the backplane, and I've ensured nothing is touching the lid when I cover it. Any Ideas? (I'm hoping to expand with a 4i card to separate the RAIDs and to expand the RAID 6 in the future, but I want to sort out any failures before I proceed). If it helps, I have a 750W powersupply at the moment.
Second issue: I have a bottleneck/responsiveness issue. When working in premiere I can work with CDNG files, but with lack luster responsiveness. I often create proxies so I can actually play smoothly (most of the time). The thing is, I can play through smooth as butter with CDNG files in Davinci Resolve, but premiere has issues. So I go and create proxies (proress 422, or 444), and I work with them in Premiere. Even with the proxies, I often get unresponsiveness on the timeline (meaning I hit play, and I wait 30 seconds before even a prores file plays). The software doesn't lock up or anything, but I get painful wait times for the playhead to start playing. I suspect it's something to do with Premiere, as Resolve has no issues that I've experienced yet (Although I just used it for the proxy workflow and coloring). Has anyone had an experience like this, or do you have any ideas for solutions?
My network performance is still very good. I get average 650MB/s with the RAID0, which I use for my projects, and the 10GbE is capable of 1.1GB/s ram drive to ram drive, so I'm not hitting any bottlenecks from what I can tell...
Any help, tips, suggestions would be appreciated. This is a home projects, and I love to tinker, so I'm happy to try things.
Thanks!