Thanks for commenting! I’m not sure if I can afford to go with 6x 20TB SAS drives over the 6x 20TB SATA drives, but will have to consider that…

Remember, when working with RAID, you’re dealing with multiple IO, so you can take throughput of one of those drives and multiply it by six, and that’s effectively what you’re going have available.

Can you explain this for me or point me to a resource to learn what you mean? My knowledge of RAID is limited to how many drive failures it can handle and the boosts in read/write speeds. I will be using RAID 5, possibly RAID 6 for my situation, so no write speed gains either way.

Let me know if I’m missing something here. My single mac computer will be the only client able to access the server.

Where I need the most speed is writing from the NVMe source to the RAID. The only time I’d be reading the data on the RAID is when it’s generating the checksum after the data transfer is complete, right?

I don’t need to access any of the files kept on the RAID while I’m offloading the footage. So the write speed from the source to the RAID should be 260-285Mbps, I think?

Thanks for the response and all the information! Sorry for not being clear about several things. I’ll try to clarify.

I will be offloading Arri Alexa 35 Capture Drives (1TB and/or 2TB) to a “Shuttle drive” as well as a “master backup”. The capture drives (source) are NVMe. The “Shuttle drive” (destination 1) is NVMe, the “master backup” (destination 2) is the HDD RAID I would like to build.

It’s all video files. Specifically, 4K ProRes 4444XQ, LogC4 files in .mxf’s.

For checksums, I meant that I will be generating the xxhash64 checksums from the codex compact drives to the 4TB NVMe shuttle drives and my RAID.

For checksum and transfer software, I’ve used Silverstack and ShotPutPro in the past.

I’ve always avoided Hedge because of what an assistant editor told me years ago (and this part is WELL beyond my understanding, so please correct me if I’m way out of line) to paraphrase what I was told:

“Hedge does not create a legitimate checksum. Hedge begins the checksum process while files are still moving between the RAM and the destination drive. A legitimate checksum must be between the destination and the source. While unlikely, there is a possibility that information could be lost between the RAM and destination making the checksum Hedge performs illegitimate.”

This is what I was told right when Hedge first came out and anytime I’ve seen Hedge asked about it since, they’ve ignored the question or skated around it. If this is incorrect, I would love to know. Hedge is incredibly affordable and faster than ShotPutPro. I just always assumed it was faster because they were cheating the checksum (based on the info above).

Back to your questions/variables.

I will be the only person that needs to access the “master backup”/RAID.

Based on what you said, I think my best bet is to build my Linux based server with a 10G network card and then network directly into my 2018 mac mini. At that point, the bottleneck is the 260-285MB/s speed of my 7200 RPM drives, right? Is there any reason why my 2018 i7 6-core with 16GB of DDR4 would slow the process down?

Originally, I thought I was going to be transcoding ArriRaw to HDE files, so I was going to get the Mac Studio for the 24-core GPU…but now that there’s no transcode I’m hoping maybe my 2018 mac mini will be sufficient?