SATA for uncompressed?

[Jim Wigler]

Only I’m getting two WD drives.

[Stevesherrick]

I’ll let you know how it works, read/write speeds, etc. You do the same, and we’ll compare notes.

Thanks,
Steve

[Shane Ross]

That setup should work just fine for uncompressed 8-bit. Even 10 bit should offer little to no problems.

[Stevesherrick]

Thanks Shane!

[Charles Simonson]

My personal tests have shown that there is not too much benefit to striping two SATA drives. In order to start seeing some performance improvements, you need to use at least three drives striped, while four is obviously better. Not saying that you couldn’t do uncompressed 8bit with just two drives, only that there is not much point to striping them beyond expanding the single partition size.

[Stevesherrick]

What if you striped across 2 different SATA cards? Would that increase the speed? Is it the single PCI card that’s the problem?

Steve

[Paul Ingvarsson]

Check out the G-SATA solution just released – it comes with a two port sata card too.

[Charles Simonson]

Its not the single card that is causing problems. It is just a basic rule of thumb that there isn’t much benefit to just striping two drives. If you need to buy two SATA cards to support a quad-drive striped array, then I would say go ahead and do it. Although, I would look more closely at other solutions such as the cards from Sonnet so only one PCI slot needed to be used. They sell a card for the mac that offers 4 internal and 4 external ports.

[Stevesherrick]

I completely disagree. I tested the drives individually and was getting speeds of between 62-66mb/s using Quickbench. After striping them, I now see speeds over 100mb/s. To me, that’s a big enough difference. I can now move away from using firewire drives as my main drives. What I am doing, to be safe using this Raid 0 method, is to backup all the media onto one of my firewire drives and if something goes wrong with the raid, I can always get the media back quickly. The specs are as follows.

Firmtek 2 port internal SATA card
(2) 250gb Seagate SATA drives

I’ll let you know how the real world performance once I use the new raid in Final Cut Pro.

[Dean Sensui]

I’ve conducted tests similar to Steve’s and got similar results. The speed of striped SATA drives are nearly double that of solo drives.

Also, there’s a much lower chance of dropped frames when dealing with a large number of rapid cuts and rendered effects.

The seek heads of the drives have to find all these files and feed them rapidly — a single drive may not be able to keep pace with demand under certain circumstances.

Dean Sensui — http://www.HawaiiGoesFishing.com