Re: [Openexr-devel] OpenEXR on the desktop!

[Paul Nolan]

> To do HD-res 24fps playback of 4-channel 16-bit OpenEXR images, you
> need about 400MB/s of sustained bandwidth.  You can get that by
> building a pretty large RAID-0 array (I'm guessing about 15 disks,
> most modern disks are capable of sustaining ~30MB/s of read
> performance), and carefully laying out the images, uncompressed, on
> disk; OpenEXR's compression methods are too slow for real-time
> playback on any CPU I know of... well, maybe you could get RLE working
> at real-time.

(Dear Santa) I would like four of these for Christmas:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20041006/raidcore32-07.html

They have four controllers with 8 SATA disks each achieving a total of 
1.1GB/s in RAID 0, and 1GB/s in RAID 50.  You might be able to get away 
with just one controller and 8 10K rpm SATA drives for real time HD 
OpenEXR playback, or two controllers and 10-12 7200 rpm drives if you need 
the larger capacity 7200rpm drives offer. See http://storagereview.com/ 
for a database of minimum transfer rates.  I think studios prefer dual 
channel fibre and externally connected storage to make managing the data 
easier, but the RAIDCore cards seem pretty economical in comparison when 
you really need huge transfer rates for a small number of users.

Paul Nolan, CEO Idruna Software Inc.
http://www.idruna.com