FW 800 on Dual G4 enough for 10 bit Uncompressed?

[David Jones]

Download the AJA system tester to see if your drives are fast enough at https://www.aja.com/support_kona.html

[Steve Covello]

I doubt that this setup will work. It might work for short clips on a drive that is nearly empty, but you will get dropped frames and many other performance problems later on. One solution is if you have two G-Raids and stripe them together, then get a FW800 PCI card [Lacie has one]. run one fw800 connection to drive A, another between drive A and Drive B, then another one from drive B to the PCI FW800 card. This will give pretty good performance. Test the throughput on it and I will bet that it should do the job.

One note, though: I know that with Lacie FW800 drives, they get slower as they get more full, and I will assume most internal IDE RAID FW drives will do the same. BTW, those big-ass FW800 drives are actually a couple IDE drives striped together inside the chassis. It’s not like they are significantly different in technology than a regular internal drive, just ‘juiced up’.

Here is a link to barefeats:

https://www.barefeats.com/fire46.html

Here’s a good picture of the guts of a Lacie Big Disk:

https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-lacie-big-external-disk.htm

steve covello
double wide post

[Michael Bugera]

Actually, this setup should work just fine! I have an almost identical setup (but with a dual mirror G4) and it runs like a dream. The G-Raid is a striped 0 array and has the juice to handle the throughput, just make sure it’s plugged into the new card with the IO on the G4’s main FW 400 input. Separation is key!
Have fun, it’s a great way to cut!

Mike Bugera
Perfect Image Video
San Diego

[Christian Vorbeck]

Thanks Mike, your response just gave me some peace of mind.
do you think I should remove the Igniter from the machine or just leave it there and have the AJA AND the Igniter? or if I leave it there, would interfere with the AJA?

Christian

Thanks Experts
Christian

[Jeremy Smith]

Luckily it sounds as though Mike’s works. But I was about to urge some caution. I’m not totally familiar with firewire cards but I know the main bottleneck in our system when we tried that wasn’t any of the cards but the pci bus speed itself. Maybe you can correct me if i’m wrong with the bus issue but our 1.25 can’t manage 10bit uncomp. without serious drop frame issues.