4k Freakout! Drive speed bottlenecks?

Been very happy w/ my 3-year-old CS6 drive setup (thanks to Harm’s recommendations) but I just started shooting a doc in 4K with the Panasonic GH4 and can't believe how fast 4K eats storage.    Have to upgrade my media drives before I transfer media and start the edit and would appreciate help figuring out where to invest to get the best bang for the buck. Thanks in advance for any discussion, links or advice.
My rig: Current motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-H57M-USB3) poses one speed bottleneck because it’s only SATA2.
CPU is I7-860 w/ 16gb RAM. Geforce GT240. (planning to get a GTX750ti)
Boot drive is 256gb SSD, 128Ggb SSD for exports, plus two internal 7200 1TBs I've been using for HD media.
Windows 7 Pro, Adobe CS6 workflow. (Basic stuff, not a lot in AfterEffects).
Think I’m going to need at least 6TB for working media instead of the current 2gb. Some questions:
Can I just replace my internal media drives w/ 2TBs or 3TBs each, or do you think 7200rpm drives in Sata2 will be a major bottleneck for working with 4K?
How about a USB3 7200rpm external drive for project media? Is USB3 fast enough?
Would two new internal drives with RAID0 (via OS or motherboard) be a lot better, even in Sata2?
Or would an external RAID be the best way to go?   (Via USB3? Or eSata?)
OR -- is it time to bite the bullet and get a new motherboard w/ Sata3...?   Or maybe even get a mobo w/ Thunderbolt?
From the many discussions of this topic, I see the best thing would be a new rig.... but can I get by with one of these incremental upgrades and still work efficiently in 4K?
Thanks!
Message was edited by: Mark Schubb

Thanks. Got it to work....
Benchmark says I have a "MPE gain of -14275/115688-0.9"   Here's the data:
-4937
-12918
-15688
-14275
Premiere Version:
6.0.5.0
So what does this result seem to indicate?
BTW, during the no-CUDA/GPU test, my CPU got REALLY HOT... opened the case and ran a fan on it to keep from going over 80c! (Other tests stayed under 60c.)
(my Speccy data is below)
Operating System
    Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
CPU
    Intel Core i7 870 @ 2.93GHz    38 °C
    Lynnfield 45nm Technology
RAM
    16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (10-11-11-28)
Motherboard
    Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. H57M-USB3 (Socket 1156)    41 °C
Graphics
    PA248 (1920x1200@59Hz)
    ASUS PA238 (1920x1080@60Hz)
    1024MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 (Gigabyte)    40 °C
Storage
    111GB ATA INTEL SSDSA2CW12 SCSI Disk Device (SSD)
    931GB ATA SAMSUNG HD103SJ SCSI Disk Device (SATA)    38 °C
    931GB ATA SAMSUNG HD103SJ SCSI Disk Device (SATA)    41 °C
    238GB ATA Samsung SSD 840 SCSI Disk Device (SSD)    29 °C
    3725GB Western Digital WD My Book 1230 USB Device (USB (SATA))    38 °C
    1862GB Western Digital WD My Passport 0741 USB Device (USB (SATA))    31 °C
    279GB Maxtor OneTouch III USB Device (USB)
Optical Drives
    ATAPI iHAS424 Y SCSI CdRom Device
Audio
    Realtek High Definition Audio

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Hi Louis XV11:
I understand from the user manual that I can write to
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Anyone run into a similar problem as this one:
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www.cdspeed2000.com
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Just pull the drive out of the FW case is all you probably need to do. Actual FW800 is less than 80MB/sec and more like 72-75MB/sec - which is as slow as your hdd gets from slow inner tracks.
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QUICK TAKES - A striped pair of Velociraptor 600G 10K HDDs matches the speed of one SSD. For less that the price of one 256G SSD, you can buy two 10K 600G Velociraptor HDDs. If you stripe them (RAID 0), you get the same sustained transfer speed as the SSD. http://www.barefeats.com/quick.html
If you are not already using all the internal drive bays, just nice to have them handy before going external. Also take a look at two other articles on Barefeats:
THINK INSIDE THE BOX: Internal Storage Innovations for the Mac ProOctober 6th, 2010
EXTERNAL STORAGE INNOVATIONS for Mac Pros -- (Added results for ATTO R680 SAS RAID adapter.)

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Bob Sabiston wrote:
Is this the right forum to ask about thumb drive speed?
Not really. A hardware question, even if it involves compatibility with 3rd party hardware, should be posting in a forum more specific to your Macintosh. There could be peculiarities about your particular machine's USB ports that might inform an answer.
I would think that writing to the Mac Journaled partition from the mac would be faster than writing to the MS-DOS one, but it doesn't seem to be. Also, it seems like the write times range wildly even to the same partition. Like, I write 150Mb to the mac partition and it takes ~3 minutes. Then I copy the same data again and it takes ~13 minutes?
Did I format it wrong? Anyone know how best to set it up so that I can write files to this thing from both an Intel SnowLeopard iMac and a Windows XP iMac??
Just format it as a FAT partition and don't worry so much about it. The speed differences between a Mac partition and a FAT partition are tiny compared to the overall slowness of an USB flash drive. I don't know how fast your HP drive is compared to others, but I know there is a wide speed range. Plus, not all flash drives are as compatible as others.
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Wow. I was thinking of posting a similar question myself. I have a G3 as a hardware router (for filtering) and I was wondering how to speed it up.
The research I've done so far has yielded these tidbits:
1) ATA 133 isn't much faster than ATA 66 for a single drive. Why? Most drives don't transfer data quickly enough to use the whole 66 Mb/sec bandwidth of ATA 66 anyways. The newest drives that have burst speeds above 66 Mbs could make a difference, but burst speeds are rarely achieved. I've been looking and I've found lots of ATA 100 drives, but no ATA 133 drives. You'd have to get a 10k Raptor or a RAID setup to see an appreciable difference from ATA 66 to ATA 133.
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HTH,
~FifthWheel

Can G4 PowerMac MDD take advantage of SATA II hard drive speed?

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Hi-
Or am I trying to cram a V8 Hemi engine into my Mini Cooper, but just hooking it up to my 4-spark plug ignition system to run it on four cylinders?
Aw, you outa get at least 6 cylinders worth out of it...and it will be one mean Mini C!
The SATA won't run at it's potential, there is no doubt. But, you will see performance increases over the ATA drives, this is for sure..
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Looking for Answers: Bootcamp, WinXP, SATA drive speed

Hey - I'm wondering if someone can pass along some info. I've yet to upgrade to 10.5 I'm running a 2.66 4-core MacPro under 10.4.11.
I am still running the Bootcamp Beta and my original sp2 install of WinXpPro.
And my SATA drives are dog-dead-slow! I've been looking around the net and most of the SATA/Drive/Bootcamp talk comes from early 2006.
My thought was Bootcamp only installed Windows - and since I have already installed windows (for 2 pieces of graphics software), I wonder if I upgrade to 10.5 and the new Bootcamp, will my drives run at full speed?
Thanks -
Glen

GlenToonz wrote:
Hey - I'm wondering if someone can pass along some info. I've yet to upgrade to 10.5 I'm running a 2.66 4-core MacPro under 10.4.11.
I am still running the Bootcamp Beta and my original sp2 install of WinXpPro.
And my SATA drives are dog-dead-slow! I've been looking around the net and most of the SATA/Drive/Bootcamp talk comes from early 2006.
My thought was Bootcamp only installed Windows - and since I have already installed windows (for 2 pieces of graphics software), I wonder if I upgrade to 10.5 and the new Bootcamp, will my drives run at full speed?
Is ultra DMA mode 5 enabled?
Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers -> ATA Channel 0 -> Advanced Settings

4k Freakout! Drive speed bottlenecks?

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