ADDING A THIRD HD IN A G5

[hamp]

I'm helping out a church set up their editing system. They have a dual G5 and Aja I/O box. They purchased two 160gb SATA seagate HD the other day. I installed the first of the two yesterday, but I noticed there is no plate or apparnet connect for a 3rd or 4th HD in the G5 like it is in the G3/G4 series. My question is this : Is there a place on the G5 for a 3rd HD and do I have to make nay additional purchases such as a PCI card or HD plate. Thanks for nay help

[Ned_Soltz]

The G5 only has room for one more internal HD. I would return the Seagate 160's in favor of the Hitachi 250, which is a far better drive. If you must keep the 2 Seagate 160's, you will need to put one of them in a firewire enclosure.

Ned Soltz
2-Pop Guide

[David]

Room for one as Ned says, but ProMax has an internal and external solution that either combines:

1. Two SATA internals with your boot drive an external FW800 device; or

2. Two SATA externals with a PCI-X SATA controller, etc.

A little pricey.

But you also could go with a BayDock800 dual bridge firewire solution from Wiebetech.com.

Review of that hopefully soon.

[CrazyHorse]

As a very recent owner of a dual 2 and a new DecklinkSP card uncompressed storage is a subject for me. I have looked at the Promax and talked to them. I checked out the firewire option for the Dual 800 mentioned in the post above.

I like the idea of the firewire because of its swapability.

I read on barefeats that they do not recommend the firewire 800's as a raid option for HDTV. Didn't say SDI. Their point was if the 4 drive setup doesn't work why not just put in another firewire 800 controller and use the built in controller for the G5 and have a dual raid that way

50 dollars for firewire 800 card
two drives with the right specs. $800 and less.

Is this a viable option for a dual 250 firewire 800 raid 0 systems offered.

Is there a difference to the firewire two drive option the company offers and going the Pci card and built in controller option.

[David]

Promax is offering an external serial ATA drive solution, I believe, not firewire.

Barefeats.com is concerned about the low write specs in G5s.

[CrazyHorse]

Barefeats says there is a problem with G5's compared to G4 duals. The G5's wll not sustain a WRITE speed fast enough to do HD. A fix is not seen in the future or even possible from what I read. I am not interested in doing HD with Firewire drives right not. I am interested in using them for uncompressed using my DeclinkSP card from BetaSP YUV input.

It seems to me that the reason they are offering the towers is they free up the internal controller for the firewire800 built into the G5. They need to do this because if you own a AJA IO or plan on using the LA or LD IO config then you need the controller in the G5 to run them.

The blackmagic card doesn't need the firewire controller that I can see.

My question is if this is true isn't buying two firewire drives 250 gig each.

Purchasing another firewire 800 controller

Use built in controller for one drive and the purchased card for the second.

Does this not give you the same configuration as what the Weitech is offering. The draw for the Weitech is you can go to 4 drives. With the "home brew" using the g5 controller and the card you are limited to two drives.

500 gig will give me enought to do a fair amount of uncompressed.

[David]

"Growing your own" makes sense so long as you buy good drives, enclosures, and a good PCI-X firewire card.

My concern is whether 54 MB/s is sufficient for uncompressed.

It gives you a lot of overhead, but will it be fast enough. <font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre> </pre><hr />