Blackmagic Forum

I am on a 2017 iMac Pro with 1tb internal drives. I used that for the OS and Software like DVR Studio. I’m using the BlackJet Cinema Dock system for my cache, project, and media. This is connected via thunderbolt 3. It’s configured such that 1 bay has a 2Tb NVMe allocated for cache, and the other 3 bays each have 4Tb NVMe setup as RAID 0 for working media and project files. I’m using RAID 0 for performance and to have a single 12Tb drive setup. It works great but recently I’ve been noticing that it may be causing DVR to be unresponsive. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the root cause is. It can be anything but in general it has something to do with the externally connected device - be it a failing NVMe, the RAID, the connection, etc.

Anyway, I wonder what others are using for externally connected devices as their project and work drive, especially those on the Mac ecosystem where the internal drives are limited in size and cannot be easily replaced, and we need large drives (12+ tb) to put a good working set of files to work on a large project. Do you use external RAID 0 and NVMe drives?

Should I just have 3 x 4Tb external NVMe drives in the BlackJet Cinema Dock and not RAID 0 or JBOD them or if that’s not relevant.

I use several SSDs, both standard and NVMe, but not RAIDed. They don't cause any issues here.
But I know that others are using RAIDed SSDs or HDDs regularly, so it might be a specific problem with that dock. But then, which source media are you working with? Other than have a nice, single huge storage, do you need to RAID them? AFAIK, that dock has only TB3, or is there a newer version?

Uli Plank wrote:I use several SSDs, both standard and NVMe, but not RAIDed. They don't cause any issues here.
But I know that others are using RAIDed SSDs or HDDs regularly, so it might be a specific problem with that dock. But then, which source media are you working with? Other than have a nice, single huge storage, do you need to RAID them? AFAIK, that dock has only TB3, or is there a newer version?

The dock has only TB3 and the 2017 iMac has only TB3 so that should be good enough. As to source media, depending on the project, it can be anything from BRAW to H.264. The reason I RAIDed them is to have a single huge storage as I could get large amounts of media for a single projects. So that is a convenience while working on large projects. How can I diagnose if the problem is the dock? Currently I am using the TB3 cable that came with the BlackJet dock. I’m getting a new OWC TB4 2.3ft cable and try that hoping it’s a cable issue and I’m told the OWC TB4 with the shorter cable makes the connection a more stable one.