IO la, Intel Mac Pro, firewire cards, and thou

[Bob Zelin]

On my 800 bus, I have 1 or 2 dual raid drives ie 2 sata drives in a firewire 800 enclosure in raid 0

I posted this before, but it seems that the IO is causing problems with the FW 800 bus AND the drive on the 400 bus –

REPLY – no kidding.

Do drives on the 400 bus conflict with the IO la? the website sez only tape decks and cameras cause issues

REPLY – yes. STOP USING FIREWIRE 400 drives !!!!!

does the IO la cause issues on the 800 bus as well?

REPLY – yes – but I use FW800 drives on the FW800 buss (don’t tell). Don’t put ANYTHING on the FW400 buss other than the I/O LA.

If i find a PCI express mac compatible FW 400 card, can i use that to connect my IO La to the mac? –

REPLY –
Listen, STOP USING FW400 drives – PERIOD. I don’t care if it’s on a FCP AJA system, FCP Blackmagic system, or AVID Xpress with Mojo system – DONT USE FW400 DRIVES – STOP IT.

I know these are pretty specific questions, but we are stuck with the friggin IO and need to make it work on the intel mac in a realistic manner ie with removable media .

REPLY – you are not stuck with the friggin I/O. STOP USING FW400 drives. It is unrealistic to think that you are going to do a job with FW400 drives. This is the real world, and no matter what you own (unless you are working with a DV camera, no capture card, and DV25 compression only), you aint’ gonna get those FW400 drives to work in a video edit system. I don’t give a crap what anybody else says on this forum – it is foolish to proceed this way. You can use FW800, you can use SATA, you can use Fibre, you can use SCSI, but DONT USE FW400. Let me take this one step further. Even if you get rid of a FW interface box like the I/O, and move to a PCI card like the Kona LSe or LHe, you STILL should NOT use
FW400 drives.

Comprende ?

Bob ZElin

REPLY

[Bob Flood]

Mr Zelin

I sense your feeling somewhat adamant about fw 400 drives

why? what are the issues with these devices?

And is FW800 any better? (or maybe its twice the headache?)

FWIW i just did a 4 camera shoot mutlicam edit, all dv25, all from a single, unstriped, 10,000 rpm fw400 drive(without the IO,)

nary a dropped frame to be had

My boss, who thinks he knows everything and refuses to listen to his staff, (which together have approx 1,000 years of experience)insists on doing a dv25 fw400 based workflow, at least for non broadcast. so i am kinda stuck here.

BUT after some research we landed on dual sata drives in a FW800 enclosure so as to allow us to move DVCPRO50 jobs between 2 fcp systems in a cost effective manner.

Oh By The way, i did some tests waiting for a response

having the IO on the 400 bus greatly decreases the writing speed of the 800 bus ie when the IO is plugged in, my write speeds to the FW800 raid 0 is 25-30 mB/sec

BUT when i unplug the IO the write speed jumps up to 60 mB/sec

if i could find a PCIe FW800 card and connect my FW800 raid 0 to this card, will i see these kinda numbers?

thanx again for your help

bee eph

[Jeremy Garchow]

Mr Flood,

We talked about his already:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=150&postid=856252&pview=t#head

Are you still living in denial?

[Bob Flood]

JG

no I live in minnesota, but i work in denial 🙂

you and zelin and aja are all saying different things: zelin sez all fw400 drives must die, you say put the io on a pci card, aja sez DONT put the io on a pci card. (all this video is giving me a headache, lets go to the mall 🙂

how about this: i buy a 400 /800 card, or a 400 card and an 800 card and i put my drives and my vtr’s on that/those cards, leaving ONLY the IO on the apple firewire 400 bus and nothing on the apple fw 800 bus. has anyone tried this? will this work?

thanx again for all the help

bee eph

[Jeremy Garchow]

Leave the io on the internal desktop bus.

Put your firewire drives on the PCI card (I re-read my last post and it does sound like I said put the io on the card, I didn’t mean it). The io should be the only firewire device attached to any internal fw port on your desktop. The fw400 and fw800 bus on the desktop IS THE SAME BUS. You need a separate card for your firewire drives. Zelin says to fire all firewire 400 drives cuz there’s much better/faster/more reliable and inexpensive drives out there. FW400 is only good for dv25, and dv25 only. dv50 or above you really need FW800 or better.

Hope this helps.

Jeremy

[Bob Flood]

JG

JG: Put your firewire drives on the PCI card (I re-read my last post and it does sound like I said put the io on the card, I didn’t mean it). The io should be the only firewire device attached to any internal fw port on your desktop.

BF: ok

J: The fw400 and fw800 bus on the desktop IS THE SAME BUS.

B: I thought this was waht was going on. nice job apple!

J: You need a separate card for your firewire drives.

B: ok. looking into combo 400 800 cards or seperate 400 and 800 cards. any suggetsions?

J: Zelin says to fire all firewire 400 drives cuz there’s much better/faster/more reliable and inexpensive drives out there.

B: yeah i knew that, i thought he was having other issues with fw 400.

J: FW400 is only good for dv25, and dv25 only. dv50 or above you really need FW800 or better.

B: ok. we do a lot of pitches, promos, loops etc at dv25, so its just fine for us. we also already own them, so we are trying to get some ROI

FWIW on a side note:
i found out there really are no firewire drives, that they are IDE or SATA drives in an enclosure or on an adapter that connects to the computer w firewire
I also know that early versions of fw 400 drive enclosure/adapters were flaky, and that the latest chipsets are actually quite stable, however they do limit to dv25 video use, but if thats all you need them for they seem to be ok

thanx again for your help and patience

now if we can just find PCIe FW cards, life will be good!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Bob Flood] “ok. looking into combo 400 800 cards or seperate 400 and 800 cards. any suggetsions?”

Since you use a combo of both fw400 and 800, I’d get a combo card. FW800 is also backwards compatible so if you can’t find a combo card, you can get your self the correct fw cable (fw800 on one end fw400 on the other) and connect to your drives that way.

Jeremy

[Bob Flood]

jg et al

thank you and good night!

bee eph

[Tom Matthies]

SIIG makes a PCIe FW800 card. It has three ports on the card. I’m running one in my Quad G5 to control a G-Raid. It works well. I also have an Aja Io connected to the internal FW400 port on the G5. No problems conflicting with the G-Raid at all. For what it’s worth, I’m also running a Kona 3 card for High Defination and a SCSI card controlling a Huge raid. That pretty much used up all my PCIe slots.
And…I’m running a pair of striped 250Gb FW800 drives for smaller projects and a single FW400 for sneaker-netting files off of the SIIG card as well.
All this is happily living on a Quad G5 with no operational problems that I have noticed.
How’s that for packing it all in?
Tom

[Bob Zelin]

I know exactly what is happening here, and it’s the sad part of our industry. It’s the reason I “rant” on these forums. This gentlemen is working for a man who is running a video company, or a video department, and wants to spend ABSOLUTELY AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE, and still try to get the job done. I face this all the time in real life. Bob Flood is just doing his job. If he worked for a company that said “hey Bob, here is 14 grand, go get yourself a loaded XServe RAID” we would not be sitting here discussing this. More and more people are working with DV25. If they are doing this, I have no idea of why anyone is involving an AJA or Blackmagic product (it’s like the AJA will turn a DV25 signal into HD-SDI).

It’s no different with “buy a black generator”, or “buy a mixer”. I am sure that Bob Flood is a very bright guy, and is hard working. His boss represents the potential demise of our industry – I hope he gets run over by a car (along with all the other people that think that broadcast video is DV25 and lower).

bob Zelin