Instruction manual

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KONA 3 Installation and Operation Manual — System Requirements
Striping divides a logical drive into data blocks, or stripes, that are distributed across
an array of physical drives. Striping a set of disks improves storage performance
because each drive operates concurrently. However, striping alone, known as RAID
level 0, offers no data protection.
Mirroring involves writing identical copies of all data to a pair of physical drives. This
results in very high data reliability: If one drive fails, the data is still available on the
remaining disk drive. However, it also results in a storage efficiency of only 50 percent,
because two physical drives are required to achieve a single drive's capacity. Mirroring
alone is known as RAID level 1.
Parity provides data protection without requiring complete duplication of the drive
contents. In the event of a drive failure, parity information can be used with data on
surviving drives to reconstruct the contents of a failed drive. Parity data can be stored
on a dedicated drive, as in RAID 3, or distributed across an array of drives, as in
RAID 5. Parity provides much greater storage efficiency than mirroring-up to 85
percent for a set of seven drives.
Software For Striping
AJA recommends the Disk Utility software provided by Apple with OS X for creating
and striping RAIDs, including 3rd-party, SCSI and Fibre Channel RAIDs. This easy
to use utility can be found in Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities , where “ Macintosh
HD ” is the name of the system drive.
Storage Example: AJA KONA 3 and Xserve RAID
For an optimum disk storage configuration with Final Cut Pro and the AJA KONA 3
—working with compressed media to uncompressed single link HD media—Apple's
Xserve RAID is an effective storage device when properly configured. Apple's Xserve
RAID holds up to 14 drive modules (resulting terabytes of storage) in a rackmount-
optimized 3U enclosure. Each 7200-RPM hard drive connects to a dedicated ATA/
100 drive channel, eliminating a traditional source of bottlenecks and maximizing the
2Gb/s Fibre Channel host connection(s). Populated with all 14 drive modules and
using 512MB cache for each controller, the XServe RAID can support the ingest and
playback of all formats up to and including uncompressed single link HD. Dual Link
HD and 2K formats are not supported on a single XServe RAID.
Note: When creating and striping an Xserve RAID with the Apple Disk Utility
provided with OS X, an ideal configuration is RAID 50: in other words, the internal
Xserve RAID drives are set up as RAID 5 via the RAID Admin application; the Xserve
RAID then shows up in Disk Utility as two drives (regardless of the number of
internal drives) which must be configured together as RAID 0. Apple calls this
configuration “RAID 50.”
When considering any high-performance disk storage system, AJA recommends
working with a qualified reseller in order to configure storage appropriate for your
needs.