Anybody Tried SATA RAID In A G4?

[Eric]

I'm considering adding a couple of SATA drives to the ATA100 bus in the back of my Dual 1Ghz G4 and striping them as a RAID through a Firmtek controller card.

Has anybody tried this on a system with FCP4? I'm interested in what kind of Real Time performance boost I could get working with DV footage. I'd at least like to get transitions and color corrected material out through Firewire to my deck without extra rendering. Standard internal drives will get me previews, but no RT output.

[David]

there are some tests at barefeats.com.

great site.

[Eric]

Actually I've been there and looked at the benchmarks, which I don't find all that useful in determining real world performance with an app like FCP with all the DV decompression, recompression, moving through the bus going on. Benchmarks indicate a standard ATA drive should be fast enough to push multiple streams of DV out through Firewire, but in reality, it isn't.

I just wondered if anyone using FCP was getting the kind of RT output I'm looking for without hardware RAIDs which are beyond my budget right now.

[David]

Eric:

I ran two IBM 120 Gb GXPs off a PCI controller, and had absolutely no problems running DV footage.

At 3.6 MB/s, these drives are way overkill for DV.

In addition, there's not compression, decompression with DV files. All the compression 5:1 occurs in the camera at the point of videotaping. Nothing occurs in the computer unless you do some titling or fx.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

So, I'm saying that using a SATA RAID to do DV work might be a waste of money.

Any body else chime in?

Take care,

[David]

Also Eric, the RT capabilities are more related to cpu speed, than to drive speed.

For color correction, etc., the computer does the work, not the speed of the hard drive.

If truly want to improve RT capabilities move to a dual processor G5, FCP4, Panther, and the anticipated FCP optimized version that others have reported at various Apple seminars.

Also, Sonnet just released a new SATA PCI controller at $100.00.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_serial_ata.html

However, your bottleneck isn't drive speed, it's cpu speed.