Under the Desktop: Storage and the Common Machine

David Morgenstern

One important performance consideration for the professional digital content creator is that of platform. However, instead of the usual dispute over differences between Mac and PC platforms, nowadays the discussion can often range over the everyday use of mobile or desktop machines for content creation.

My attention was drawn to a recent advertisement by Avid Technology Inc. for its Avid Xpress DV video editing software. Placed in front of the software’s timeline interface were a pair of laptops, one from Apple Computer and the other what looks to be an Hewlett-Packard Compaq notebook.

Now, the computers obviously represent the fact that the software supports both Mac and Windows operating systems. But their appearance was more than that simple message: Almost all of the marketing materials for Avid Xpress DV as well its big brother, Avid Xpress Pro, show the software running on a notebook.

At the same time, I admit that my recent computing lifestyle has headed towards mobility. I now move between a pair of machines — both notebooks.

First is the elegant Apple PowerBook G4 with a 1-GHz PowerPC processor and 15-inch screen. It’s a desktop-replacement machine with a full range of built-in features such as a writable DVD drive and a many types of I/O ports.

My other everyday machine is a IBM ThinkPad X31, running Windows XP (see Figure 2). Most everything about it is small, like its 12-inch screen and 3.5-lb. weight (IBM has stripped it down to hit that size, however). It’s still a very capable machine with a 1.25-GHz mobile Pentium 4 processor. I use a dock to connect peripherals such as a larger display.

Both of these notebooks have sufficient power for my Web development work, which mostly juggles large and small text files. In the image-manipulation department, my work tends to focus on removing resolution from images.

For folks in still-image and video production (or wanting to do the same), workflow demands on processor, storage, and system bus would be different.

A couple of years ago, I looked at this issue of mobile computers for creative tasks and I had doubts over the processor performance, expandability and video options. Now, in the meantime, the processor performance and video-display capabilities of mobile computing platforms have increased. And color calibration companies now offer hardware calibration devices to support built-in LCD screens.

Still, do these notebooks really have enough horsepower for a graphics-intensive workflow?

Some content-creation pros — especially those processing Web graphics like me — may find them sufficient. Many of today’s portables offer much of the performance punch found in desktop machines of a few years ago and come in a mobile form factor.

However, current desktop systems offer a great leap in performance and expandability from these mobile machines, coming with support for 64-bit processing, and serious expansion options. Picking a mobile platform over a desktop workstation is a significant decision, one that could influence potential productivity gains for your workflow over a span of several years, depending on your hardware budget.

Weighing Architectures
One place where it’s easy to see the long-term performance implications between mobile and desktop architectures is in support for specialty storage. Storage power is important to all professional content creation applications, whether to improve the speed of still-image editing, or to feed high-resolution video to digital-cinema workstations.

At this winter’s Macworld Expo and the Photo Marketing Association shows, vendors showcased new developments in storage systems aimed at content creation. The performance-value equation is shifting in the storage area, with new advances bringing opportunities for moving up a notch in the speed of scratch disks and handling large files.

For content creators, there are two primary “ecologies” of storage systems, which happen to cluster around interfaces. Each ecology provides niches that support a wide range of storage, from small desktop systems to large multidisk storage servers.

The first surrounds the interfaces that come as standard equipment on most mobile (and desktop) systems, such as USB 2.0, Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and FireWire.

The second set of storage systems use high-performance interfaces for the most part not found on computer logic boards, such as Serial ATA, Fibre Channel, and even flavors of the venerable SCSI. They require users to install an expansion card in the host machine.

Of course, the products aimed at a wider market — those capable of working on both standard mobile and desktop systems — will cost less than ones requiring a specialty host adapter card. And many of the storage devices are functional with good performance.

Still, the greatest performance, capacity, and expansion potential will come from the higher-priced spread.

Putting a Different Face on Storage
High-performance storage systems often provide opportunities for greater capacity, speed, and reliability. Some systems employ technologies such as RAID (redundant arrays of inexpensive disks) and extensive management software. This lets you customize its performance based on your particular needs, such as the difference between lots of small files or fewer, very-big ones.

Back at Expo time, Apple introduced a few configurations of its Xserve RAID system. It’s a good example of such a high-performance storage package using an alternate interface, in this case the dual 2-gigabit Fibre Channel streams.

The system can support capacities up to 3.5 terabytes and provide sustained data-transfer rates of more than 200MB per second, even while providing the data protection of RAID. These speeds are much higher than available from a USB 2.0 or for video production. Several video mavens told me they were eyeing the Xserve RAID.

There are many companies that offer similar, competing RAID systems in this space, some bigger, some smaller. Some use inexpensive ATA drives like Apple’s system, while others use high-performance drives. The Xserve uses 2-GB Fibre Channel, and some competing systems use other interfaces. For example, La Cie’s TX12000 RAID box uses a Ultra320 SCSI interface. This unit can scale from 3 drives to 12 and 24 drives.

In addition, these systems are often scalable, meaning that you can get started with less capacity or features and then expand the system later without suffering a performance hit. That’s different than just adding another drive to your FireWire chain.

In addition to Fibre Channel and Ultra SCSI interfaces, users of workstations can take advantage of Serial ATA interfaces, which is now standard equipment on many models. As I pointed out following my tour of the Intel Developer Forum last fall, many vendors are prepping external SATA systems for later this year.

Only a desktop system can take direct advantage of the performance and flexibility available from these high-end storage systems. The required host adapter cards are beyond the design parameters of a notebook.

Advances in Standard Storage
While some top-of-the-hill big storage systems simply don’t work with mobile computers, vendors keep resetting the mark for performance in all segments of the industry.

The price and performance ratio of any technology is a moving target, especially in storage. What was once good performance for top devices gradually migrates down the market to become the standard for midrange and then entry-level solutions.

For example, one advance demonstrated this winter was faster, smarter FireWire-to-ATA bridge logic that improves the performance of one or two FireWire 800 hard disks.

Storage-savvy readers will recall that there are no true, or native, 1394 or USB 2.0 storage devices. Native interfaces can talk directly to the drive mechanism, whereas FireWire and USB drives combine an ATA mechanism with a “bridge” chip that connects the drive hardware to the actual interface. (If you want to know more of the back-story on this process, you can read a long-ago column written at the introduction of USB 2.0.)

Vendors showed FireWire 800 drives running Oxford Semiconductor’s OXFW912 processor. This new version builds on the work done in the previous OXFW911 and OXFW922 chips. To boost performance the updated processor supports more features found in the latest ATA standards, and optimizes the handling of small pieces of data. This sauce improves performance, especially when used with high-performance disk mechanisms.

This new chip can boost the performance available from a single drive, perhaps now delivering on the promise of FireWire 800. According to drive vendors, the new drives can support high-resolution digital video editing with a single drive.

However, it also has some special routines for small two-drive arrays. For example, LaCie at the Macworld Expo introduced a new version of its Big Disk system with the OXFW912, called the Big Disk Extreme. The “Disk” is a compact two-drive striped array that appears to the user as a single 500GB hard disk.

The company said the system offers a sustained data transfer rate of 88 MB per second. The 500GB model comes with a larger cache and costs $579.

Did it sound as if I was dissing FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 products earlier? No way! These products are aimed at the base computer system, which today means a mobile desktop. They offer great performance and value, one that keeps progressing as we can see.

About a year ago there were questions about the performance and value of FireWire 800 drives. That’s no longer the case with the latest generation of products. Certainly, content creators looking at FireWire 800 storage this spring, regardless of the vendor or number of drives, should make sure they purchase units with the latest bridge chips.

Still, high-performance technology flows down stream, from applications such as clustered computing and heavy-duty server applications in the enterprise. Or even from systems developed for movie production. To take advantage of the opportunity, we need to weigh its potential and costs well before we sign the slip at the register for that new notebook computer.

The proverb tells us: “How much better than gold is wisdom, and understanding than silver.” Of course, when it comes to storage wisdom and understanding can lead to performance and better value.