I have a G-Technology G-Speed ES Pro 4 disk 4TB RAID 0 which is connected to my PC via a RAID controller card and miniSAS connector . The machine itself is an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.8GHz, 8GB ram running Windows 7 . The G-Speed ES Pro on paper gets around 400MB/s transfer speed, which a quick benchmark I did confirmed .
Historically I have always rendered out .png (when .exr is not needed) sequences from 3D and comp tools but found when trying to read and write them to the RAID I was not getting any particular performance boost . In fact I noticed on one particularly long render job it was taking longer to write the frames to disk than to render the frames !
On a hunch I thought I would try another format like .tga and immediately I had a very clear increase in speed and was able achieve realtime playback of these images sequences up to 2k . I was never able to do this with .png .
So I am wondering, is there something inherently difficult in working with .png format such as there being a processing bottleneck to deal with the compression ?
Could it be that my stripe size is too big/small ?
Is there another format I should consider such as .sgi ?
Is something else at work here that I haven’t considered ?
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated .
Michael
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