Lindsay Horner
Cadet
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2016
- Messages
- 7
Hi all. I’m hoping you can help point me in the right direction because I have quite a specific use-case.
I’m a motion graphics designer / 3D generalist, and I work between both Mac and PC. I spend my days dealing with large image sequences (PNG, TIFF and OpenEXR generally - mostly zip compression) that can be anywhere from 200KB to 200MB per frame… often totalling 10’s or 100’s of GBs for the whole sequence which can be many thousands of frames. This data gets shuffled around between my workstation and 3 render nodes as well as a render server.
I’ve been using direct attached storage for working files, and Synology/Qnap/OSX network storage for the last few years, but gigabit networking is starting to get me down, and having recently moved to the UK and sold off a lot of my older gear it is time for a new build.
I’ve worked on many different SANs and storage systems in different TV/advertising studios over the years and have found that many of them choked on image file sequences. I did recently have quite a good experience* working off an all-SSD 8 bay Qnap with 10GbE and that has encouraged me to go down this route (minus the Qnap). (I’d add that a lot of the issues here have to do with having a lot of users - a problem I won’t have).
So two main questions (with sub questions!):
Thanks for reading all of this and thanks in advance for your ideas. Hope I've included all relevant info.
Lindsay
I’m a motion graphics designer / 3D generalist, and I work between both Mac and PC. I spend my days dealing with large image sequences (PNG, TIFF and OpenEXR generally - mostly zip compression) that can be anywhere from 200KB to 200MB per frame… often totalling 10’s or 100’s of GBs for the whole sequence which can be many thousands of frames. This data gets shuffled around between my workstation and 3 render nodes as well as a render server.
I’ve been using direct attached storage for working files, and Synology/Qnap/OSX network storage for the last few years, but gigabit networking is starting to get me down, and having recently moved to the UK and sold off a lot of my older gear it is time for a new build.
I’ve worked on many different SANs and storage systems in different TV/advertising studios over the years and have found that many of them choked on image file sequences. I did recently have quite a good experience* working off an all-SSD 8 bay Qnap with 10GbE and that has encouraged me to go down this route (minus the Qnap). (I’d add that a lot of the issues here have to do with having a lot of users - a problem I won’t have).
So two main questions (with sub questions!):
- Any ideas on what I can do to speed up the image sequences… I’ll be using SSDs but is this a question of IOPs? Or pure read/write speed? How does compression affect this? Are consumer SSDs OK? Very curious to hear some opinions.
- I haven’t managed to find any really solid info on the relationship between GHz and 10GbE speeds. Is it all about clock speed? Or is it also the protocol? CPU recommendations most welcome. I’d be happy with 500-700Mbps if that were possible.
Thanks for reading all of this and thanks in advance for your ideas. Hope I've included all relevant info.
Lindsay