Storage is a consistent problem for video producers, and I just learned about a new, high performance, relatively low cost solution. Plus saw the Red camera in action, got a refresher course on RAID numerology and met with filmmaker Thor Wixom in the same meeting.

First the storage technology, which is called xSATA, and available on a product from AMCC called 3ware Sidecar, which includes a PCI Express card and enclosure that can house up to four disks drives (around $595). Configure the unit with four, 1TB drives, and you can get up to 4T of storage for about $2,000, which isn’t that much more on a per gigabyte basis than a simple eSATA system.

Where eSATA uses one connection to service all drives in an external enclosure, xSATA devotes one connection to each drive. AMCC claims that this increases throughput from an actual bandwidth of about 40 MB/second for eSATA to about 350MB for xSATA.

eSATA also uses software-based RAID for mirroring or redundancy, which takes CPU cycles away from editing and rendering. In contrast, xSATA uses chips on the PCI Express card to handle RAID related chores, preserving the CPU for your usage. In addition, AMCC reported that software-based RAID relies on information stored on the computer to restore lost data in the event of a hard disk crash in the eSATA RAID. If your CPU goes down, and a drive, you may not be able to restore your data on a different computer. On the other hand, the company claimed, with xSATA, you just move the card into a different computer and restart editing.

You can configure the Sidecar in RAID 0 (striping for performance), 1 (mirroring for total redundancy, but halving disc space), 5 (rotating partitions so you can recover from any single drive failure), 10 (striped and mirrored), JBOD (Just a Bunch of Discs, or each drive separately) or as a single disk. JBOD is one more acronym than I need in my life right now, but it’s got a nice ring to it.

Who needs this kind of speed? Well, Thor Wixom showed footage from a companion DVD he’s producing for a children’s book entitled The Night Before Christmas (sounds like a killer project, by the way). Working on an HP Dual-Processor, Quad-Core system running Premiere Pro, with the Red 4K footage converted into Cineform format, Thor played two color corrected streams topped by a semi-transparent title at full frame rate.

While chatting with Thor, I commented that with my typically three HDV camera event type shoot, xSATA might be a bit more than I needed at the present time. He commented that you don’t buy solely for today, you buy for tomorrow, which makes a lot of sense given that some of the more common HD formats like DVCPROHD100, that have four times the bit rate of HDV. While I certainly don’t have a Red in my future, higher bitrate HD footage is definitely coming, and it’s nice to think that the drives I buy today will be useful in a year or two, especially since the price premium is negligible compared to eSATA.