Multibridge Extreme question? I want to hook it up to my MacBookPro laptop for uncompressed HD.

[Bob Zelin]

of course not. The limiting factor is your drive array speed, and the internal drive will NOT do uncompressed HD. Currently, the minimum requirement for uncompressed HD is 5 SATA drives in a box like the Cal-Digit, so it will be YEARS before the speed of a single drive in a laptop is fast enough for uncompressed HD.

If you think you are going out on a shoot with a Sony CineAlta, and a laptop, and will record 1080i uncompressed on a laptop, you are dreaming.

No ad implies that this will work.

Bob Zelin

[Paul Provost]

yeah – let him have it Bob!
but no crack pipe references?

[Bj Ahlen]

The next question is if some enthusiast has hooked up such a 5-drive RAID to the eSATA connector on the MacBook Pro?

In theory at least that interface should suffice, at 3 Gbps it at least exceeds what the camera is feeding.

I agree it is getting to the point of silliness, but it could be a bit more portable than a Mac Pro setup.

[Bob Zelin]

I just read a FANTASTIC review on http://www.barefeats on this subject, that I will copy below, WITHOUT permission from Barefeats (hope this is not an issue). To summarize, the Express card that goes in the MAC Book Pro does NOT have the bandwidth for uncompressed HD, even with 5 drives –

Hope I’m not in trouble for copying this –
bob Zelin

Though the theoretical bandwidth of an ExpressCard is 256MB/s, the current speed limit of all ExpressCards is about HALF of that when used with a RAID set no matter how many drives are connected. This is due to the fact that all current ExpressCard products use the Silicon Image 3132 chip set and, for some reason, that’s as fast as it can go. Actually, the same is true of when the 3132 chipset is used in a PCIe SATA host adapter for the Mac Pro.

We ran a five bay PM enclosure (filled with Hitachi 7K500s) on our Mac Pro with a using the Sonnet E4P host adapter (based on a Marvell chipset). We got 240MB/s READ, 216MB/s WRITE. We moved the same enclosure to a MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard SATA host adapter (based on the Silicon Image 3132 chipset): 125MB/s READ, 111MB/s WRITE. Hopefully future improvements in the chipset and/or firmware will overcome this speed limit and MacBook Pro owners can experience true joy when they connect a four or five drive array to their ExpressCard.

[Bj Ahlen]

As has been said many times before, “The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is.”

It’s as always a good reminder to test all workflows on a small scale first…