Apple: Don't Edit Video over Ethernet

Don't store your media on networked drives using ethernet. That's the message from this support document from Apple. One of the problems seems to be that the TCP/IP protocol really slows down the transfer of data. While gigabit ethernet is supposed to be faster than Firewire, it practically can't move video and audio files fast enough to satisfy your non-linear editing system. So for affordable storage stick with drives hooked up with Firewire and SATA connections.

That being said, there are systems out there that provide shared storage for editing over ethernet. The advantage is that these systems are much cheaper than the shared storage systems based on fiber channel like Apple's XSan/XServe software/hardware combination. Last year, I got to talk to a sales rep for EditShare and at this MacWorld I talk to someone from 2 Degrees Frost. They both said they were able to use the ethernet cable and work around the limitations of TCP/IP and the Mac OS. They are significantly cheaper than any of the fibre-based shared storage, but still significantly more expensive than using local drives to store your video.

As I mentioned in a previous post "RAID-5 on a G4", I once experimented with using an old G4 as a file server for media files. I banged my head up against this problem with ethernet, TCP/IP, and Mac OS. While you may not be able to build a shared-storage system yourself, there are vendors and manfacturers out there offering the promise of using inexpensive ethernet networking to deliver video to editors.