Paging Bob ‘SATA’ Zelin…

[Bob Zelin]

This is a great post. It’s a shame that Panasonic won’t allow the standard FW path to record the DVCProHD signal to anything besides the Firestore FS-100. (one day …..)

Bob Zelin

[Jeremy Garchow]

Hey Lawrence, is it true you can’t RAID those two together, even if you wanted to?

Thanks for the info by the way.

[Bob Zelin]

you can ABSOLUTELY RAID the two drive (or more than two drives) together at RAID 0 using the Apple Disk Utility. 2 SATA drives stripped together gives you about 128mb/sec – enough to easily do 8 and 10 bit uncompressed SDI, and DVCProHD with NO problems.

Bob Zelin

[Jeremy Garchow]

Well, if you call granite Digital, supposedly that particular card can’t do it. Remember this is for a Powerbook and PCMCIA adapter.

[Lawrence Marshall]

The PCMCIA SATA card has two ports, and therefore can take two separate drives, which show up as two drives on your desktop. Once there, those two drives can be set up as a RAID. The PCMCIA SATA card just provides a way to get the drives into the laptop, and you can do what you want from there.

The only reason I’m not RAIDing them on the Powerbook is that I would not be able to clone them to a backup RAID. You’d need a four-port SATA PCMCIA card, which I don’t think exist yet.

I use SoftRAID as my drive formatting, striping, and RAID utility.

Larry M

[Ed Dooley]

Barefeats tested FWDepot’s SATA cardbus card in a PB a while ago, with beta drivers, though. The performance with one drive was 60MB reads
and 77MB writes (sustained). Two drives used independently drove performance down. Raid0 brought performance down to 32MBs.
https://www.barefeats.com/hard54.html
They tested Seritek’s card and found better performance, but lousy performance if you had an October 2005 PB compared to the 2004 PB.
In either PB they didn’t come close to 128MB, 109MB reds and 97 writes (sustained).
https://www.barefeats.com/hard65.html
Ed

[Bob Zelin] “you can ABSOLUTELY RAID the two drive (or more than two drives) together at RAID 0 using the Apple Disk Utility. 2 SATA drives stripped together gives you about 128mb/sec – enough to easily do 8 and 10 bit uncompressed SDI, and DVCProHD with NO problems. “

[Jeremy Garchow]

That’s what I figured, but I heard it form the horses mouth (Granite Digital) that it couldn’t be done. I didn’t believe them. Thanks for the info. I’m getting everything delivered next week and I’ll post back with results.

Jeremy

[Bob Zelin]

I foolishly assumed that you were going to get the Firmtek Seritek PCMCIA card, not the Granite Digital card. The Firmtek will work for your application. The Barefeats website is where I get all my info from.

Bob Zelin

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would have gotten the Firmtek card, but it’s vaporware. I’ll get it when it’s out.

Jeremy

[Ed Dooley]

The only speed tests I’ve come across for *any* SATA cardbus cards is the FWDepot card and the Seritek card, both tested by barefeats.com.
There seems to be a problem with them in terms of sustained throughput. Barefeats speculated that it could be the 32bit bandwidth,
or possibly the drivers (a little tweaking may help).

I’ve been waiting for a Raidable (new word!) SATA cardbus card for my PB for a long time. Unless someone has a link to another test, barefeats.com is the only
source for their speeds. And unless Seritek changes something between the pre-release tests and actual release, the
card won’t reach 128MBs, even if Bob wants it to. 🙂
Ed