How To Build A DIY 4K Raid..!

iamfilmguy.com by Ryan Brown

As many of you may already know or should know...4K is here to stay! That's right...each year the past several we've been hearing and seeing more and more 4K buzz at big expos like CES and Nabshow especially. So far we've seen the 4K TV and Professional Monitors hit market each year but at a very high buy in price. Though more recently the hottest screen for the money is the the Seiki 4K going for around $1499(or less...I've seen them sell for as little as $1k on ebay). This has been one big issue with 4K still taking a long time to be embraced outside of the local Movie Theaters like Regal, AMC, or for me locally Cinetopia have all upgraded screens to 4K. This past Nabshow we also got another curve ball. Blackmagic Design introduced a 4K Cinema Camera to follow last years 2.5K for $3k camera. The exciting part is it's only $4K for 4K(you can learn more about it on my Blackmagic Booth vid). The other issue have been how do I play it out. Well more recently various companies are offering you options. Nvidia have several offering that will output 4K, Matrox as well with their 4K Mojito Card(also check out my booth vid for Matrox with Dan discussing their new 4K card), and again Blackmagic with their New DeckLink 4K Extreme so as you can see you have options!


Unfortunately I can't offer you any ideas to build your own 4K i/o card, camera, or monitor...but if you're like me and are looking forward to a World In 4K...then one other major piece of the puzzle outside of a fairly beefy machine like my HP Z820 which is my Workstation of choice(you can also follow my journey switching from Mac to HP here). As of now the fastest machine for your A/V needs is the the HP Z820...only time will tell how the new MacPro performs next to a pimped out Z820(I would love to put it to the test Apple...you can learn more about the new 2013 MacPro here). So it's pretty clear all the companies are bringing 4K hardware to market sooner than later-reality is...it's already here). It really only comes down to money. There really isn't a compromise. In time all tech gets better, faster, cheaper. I only expect to see more in the coming years!

So what does that all this above have to do with anything. Well in my blog post I like to not just give you one idea...I like to let you in on the variety of stuff you might need. One area I think can be easily forgotten is how you plan to store all this data, play it back, and have a backup. Well when it comes to 4K it's a ton of Data. I myself own a Red and shoot everything in 4K. I outgrew my 8-bay iStoragePro iT8MIS. Nothing against their bigger 16 bay raids....I just hit a bottleneck in my workflow with my old 3GB/s Atto R380 and iStoragePro solution. I needed bigger, better, faster. I priced it around and iStoragePro had a nice enclosure but at this point in time out of my budget. I believe sell for around $2k(by itself with no drives). If you don't have the time to tackle a DIY raid I highly recommend their solutions. Another company that a lot of Red users use is Maxx Digital. They have a sweet soluiton but is pricy. I priced out a 32 TB solution at $12.5K I believe. Not all of us including me can afford that(at least not at this time). So I started looking into a DIY solution. Doing some basic searches I really didn't find any info on creating such a raid. Since I've been up against this challenge and no good documented solution I figured this might be of great interest being that the transition to 4K is getting to be a lot more possible(this 4K do we need it or not debate is not what this post is about-it's for users who want to or need to and need a bigger, better, faster raid they might be able to build themselves-but I assure you this applies to anyone really. This will work with any format smaller or bigger...it's just storage...but not all storage can handle 4K so that's why I'm sharing how you can build your own)! read more...