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Glyph Drives
We are looking to buy a new 3/4TB drive to edit a long format doc in Adobe Premiere Pro. We’ve used a GTech RAID 5 set up with their esata card, but found the drive noisy and turning it off required rebooting the Mac Pro. We have since resorted to 1TB drives by GTech and LaCie. Both companies seem to have lost some confidence among users. Is that true or have I just read too many posts? Has anyone used Glyph Drives? They appeal to me because they seem to be a small, customer oriented company.
Any advice is welcome. Thanks.
Using mid 2008 Intel based Mac Pro
Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5 -
4 Replies
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All firewire drives are subject to power suplly failure because the majority of the manufacturers you mentioned typically use the least expensive components available in their sealed FW enclosures.
Though you may not like the noise or inconvenience of your G-Tech RAID, the throughput and thus the realtime perfornance you get from that array should easlily eclipse those minor issues. Realtime performance equates to less render time throughout your day, week, and year, and the means more time day in and day out for creative editing. If you do the math sometime you’ll freak out when you realize how much silly time Firewire drives are actually costing you.
So, rather than buying even more FW drives, which are the least cost-effective drives, the least efficient drives, and the most prone to failure of all drives on the market, you’d do better to deal with the noise issue on your G-Tech array – that can be done by isolating with some inexpensive sound insulating foam from Guitar Center, etc., or simply by buying a longer eSATA cable and putting the enclosure on the floor and/or behind something.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Hi David:
Thanks for your response. If I use the eSATA port on the GLYPH GPT50 doesn’t that eliminate
the FW issues you referenced?Dual G5 2.0, 4MB, G-Raid 800GB FW 800 FCP Studio Upgrade 5.0.3
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Well, not entirely Katherine, because your RAID-5 enclosure almost certainly has 4, 6, or 8 drives, while the Glyph most likely has just one or two drives, and the number of drives striped together increases the throughput of the device. Double the number of drives striped together and you increase throughput by approximately 2X.
So, while the eSATA connection is undoubtedly much faster than FW-800, a four, six, or eight drive array will be a whole lot faster, and thus will increase throughput and realtime performance by a factor that will be approximately 4 to 8X greater, with that number being dependent upon the number of drives.
Hope this helps…
DRW
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.comSales | Integration | Support
David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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thanks! very helpful, David.
Dual G5 2.0, 4MB, G-Raid 800GB FW 800 FCP Studio Upgrade 5.0.3
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