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PCMCIA Hard Disk Drives?
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[Ron Shook] “An “LSI” is some sort of custom circuit or chip?”
Hi Ron, it is a Large Scale Integrated circuit that has a fairly specific sets of software that is a housekeeping firmware for the P2 card, read, write, delete, display and playback.
An off the shelf PCMCIA HDD will not work as it is missing this firmware.
Does that help?
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
[Mariusz] “This is interesting statement since you can not record that much video on those cards.”
why ?
the P2 cards are in actually a 4 volume Secure Digital Raid 0 array. There are 4 SD memory cards striped together (controlled by an LSI chipset) Micro drives cannot yet maintain the correct spindle speed to achieve the capture rate needed for realtime acquisition.
The specs on this drive talk about read speeds and but not write speeds – with out the proper cache and raid control this is not possible.About LSI
this chip company makes a majority of controller chips for transmitting content over ethernet, fibre and SCSI in addition to a major supplier of RAID controller chips as is used in the Panasonic P2 cards
They also manufacture the Apple fibre cards and offer the windows driver for that low cost card on their web site.Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA -
[gary adcock] “[Mariusz] “This is interesting statement since you can not record that much video on those cards.”
why ?”
On 4GB P2 card you can record 10min in 720/24pN mode. In my opinion this is not much.
P2 Store is hard disk, computer has hard disk and both are prone to failures. In example 2 years ago I broked my laptop motherboard in my baggage and week ago one of my 3 FireWire drives failed. So far all my tapes are fine.
I am happy with safety of P2 cards but I am waiting for archiving solution like Blu-Ray. Otherwise I want to record to system with redundant drives.
My point was that HDD’s are almost unavoidable now as most economical and easiest way to transfer or store video from P2 cards.
Regards,Mariusz
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You can read some of the reverse engineering things that the CinePorter/Spec-Comm people are finding. The P2 card is not just a memory RAID, it has a lot of computation that it needs to do (as Jan alludes to). A microdrive doesn’t have any of that capability.
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Sorry, let me clarify;
I will have a hard drive to offload to, but I don’t want a hard drive *connected to the camera* in the field that will be bouncing all over the place in the direct sunlight and susceptible to all kinds of problems. I do narrative work, so 10 minute runtimes are just fine for me (and they’ll only continue to grow from here), so P2 works great for what I do.
When I said I had absolutely no interest in hard-drive acquisition, I was talking about something like the Firestore or CinePorter – not eliminating any use of a hard drive from the entire chain.
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