nice cheap setup

[Shane Ross]

I got the Sonnet Tempo 4+4 card….and built a 2TB Raid capable of uncompressed HD for under $1400:

https://homepage.mac.com/comeback/iblog/Work/B787268209/C836512295/E20060606210202/index.html

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Walter Biscardi]

Don’t purchase anything but the Quad if you want to be ready for HD. The Dual 2.0 you list is the older PCI-X architecture so anything you purchase to be installed inside the machine won’t work with the newer machines in the future. Capture cards, hard drive controllers, etc…. will be useless if you upgrade your computer in a year or two.

As for hard drives, for SATA I like the LaCie S2S 2.5TB array. For Fibre, I’m looking seriously at Ciprico right now.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Arnie Schlissel]

There are no DIY RAID 3 solutions on the mac right now. You can buy a fiber or SCSI RAID box with RAID 3, but you can’t build your own. For PCIe Power Macs, you can buy a Rocket Raid from Highpoint Technologies that will give you RAID 5 on as many as 8 SATA drives in a single 8 drive or a pair of 4 drive enclosures. With the new 750 GB drives, that could give you over 5TB at RAID 5.

Arnie
Now in preproduction: Peristroika (Cosmological Congress), a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

Stay away from Rocket Raid. If anything goes wrong you can’t get them on the phone and it takes FOREVER to get a replacement. I abandoned SATA a while ago with too many bad experiences, but I’m sure the technology has changed a bit since then. If you decide to go RAID 0 SATA, you better buy some FW800 backup drives. After the cost of that, you might as well have bought a nice RAID from Huge. If you want reliability and stability you should go with a prebuilt, pretested RAID, but you are going to have to pony up for it. The SATA RAIDs from LaCie and fibre channel GRAID look pretty good though, and will give you Raid3. They still aren’t the cheapest things on the market, but their prices are a bit more achievable. Remember, even though you think your computer is the hardest working thing in shoe business, it’s not. It’s your RAID array. A computer might do more calculations, but your Raid Array is constantly spinning, constantly moving, constantly reading and writing on to a physical medium. Don’t skimp on it. Also, I’m not sure how mechanically and tech head inclined you are, but building and maintaining a SATA Raid is a little different. If something goes wrong, you might have to call two or three different companies, with a RAID manufacturer, you call one place and one number and have direct support. I have a Huge (Ciprico) RAID and it’s been awesome. Huge tech support has been really nice as well. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s sure been worth the money.

2 pennies

Jeremy

[Frank Nolan]

[oxyde] “nice cheap setup”

I dont know whether this and HD fit together.
How do you plan on getting the HD footage onto the Raid set up and then monitoring it while editing?

[Oxyde]

Thanks fellows,
Your suggestions are precious. That’s a good thing you mentionned that the G5 2.0 is PCI_x I didn’t check that before.

Well, me and computer: I’ve been working on Flame for the past 2 years and
FCP 4 years. I didn’t really keep myself posted on equipment (i know Its bad)
Im now a freelancer so I want to be able to work up to uncompressed HD.

I was wondering if the DIY Raid was a good solution cause the enginieer at my old office build 6 RAID3 2TB each and they running really smoothly.
He told me each RAID cost around $1,200.
An important thing : Im living in china. So material cost is really different.
everything DIY is really cheap. Any system from Huge or else is mega expensive
(Im not a post house, I guess this is why)

Maybe Im not ready to make the move if I have to buy a pre built system.
DIY is the only soluce for the moment. Im will ask my pal some physical help on that.

thanks a lot again

[Josh Weiss]

I would wait a week or two before purchasing anything. Don’t handycap yourself with soon to be obsolte hardware when the Intels come out.