10bit and FW800. HOW?

[Bob Zelin]

Buy SATA, and be done with it. 2 SATA drives from any manufacturer – G-Tech, Lacie, Firmtek, ProMax, etc. will do 10 bit SDI flawlessly. If you want cheap, you can get a Terabyte of SATA storage from Firmtek, and use the 2 port SATA card that comes with the bundle, all for about $1000.

Walter has used the G-Tech FW800 for 10 bit, but I am sure that he does his “real jobs” with his Fibre Medea. You certainly can use FW800 drives, and I can assure you that 8 bit with a single FW800 drive will do exactly what you want. With 10 bit – what you describe will probably work, but if it was me, I would go SATA. Cheap, and no aggrivation.

Bob Zelin

[Joel Jackson]

I went to the firmtek site and see the cards and enclosures. However, they do not come with drives. What kind of drives are reccomended? Where should I buy them from? Is there a difference between the 3GB and 1.5GB drives? I’m an old school SCSI dude. This is all new to me.

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[Bob Zelin]

easy – call Maxx Digital in Calif. (714) 374 4944. Speak to Ron Amborn.
I get all my stuff from him – he sells the Hitachi and Seagate SATA drives, the Firmtek enclosures, and the Sonnet SATA host if you want as well. It’s all real cheap. He was my source for SCSI until I started using SATA so much.

I usually use 2 400 gig or 2 500 Gig Hitachi SATA drives, giving me 800 Gig or 1 Terabyte, in a RAID 0 configuration. I have not had one failure yet (although it’s only been since April 05 since I have been using SATA, so I am sure that they will start to fail once the year is up !). You will have no problems doing 10 bit SDI uncompressed with this configuration. There are other, safer ways to do this (HUGE and Medea with RAID 3 protection), but they are much more expensive.

bob Zelin

[Guy]

I use 400 gig Seagate drives from zipzoomfly.com. $220 each

[Jerry Witt]

I use the 250 gig Seagates also from zipzoomfly.com. They were recently on sale for $99 each. I use the FirmTek 4 port card and 2-port enclosure.

[Steve Covello]

Here’s a string from the archives about one person’s frustration/solutions dealing with SATA RAID featuring Our Man Bob lamenting the forces needed to jam the connections in:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?univpostid=843260&forumid=98&postid=843492&pview=t

If for some reason the link is a dud, search in the archives with this text: Sonnet X8 and the Kona 2 Card

If you are not the tinkering type, this setup might be a bit of a pain versus going with a straight up GRaid drive or XServe RAID. I have also had success with 10-bit in the following configuration using AJA IO, 2 Lacie 500gb {or 250gb} FW800 drives on a G5 with a Lacie FW800 PCI card added:

– one FW800 cable from G5 native FW800 port to drive 1
– one FW800 cable from PCI card to drive 2
– stripe the two drives into a RAID via Disk Utility, not journaled.

I can’t say whether this will work perfectly once the drives get more than 80% full since I did not test it to this extent. One other dude mentioned that the difference between Lacie 500gb drives and GRaid drives in terms of performance was that, althought they both have 2 internal drives striped together, the GRaid’s drives spin “in the opposite direction” from each other so that the lapse in performance when the drives become full does not occur. I have not seen any corroborating facts to verify this, but I will take him at his word since it seems people advocate the GRaid pretty well.

Happy loading!

steve covello
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