Serial ATA drives for video?

[Jeff Carpenter]

You should keep the system drive seperate for video, in my opinion. Which means no RAIDs for the G5 since you only have one drive bay left.

But SATA is certainly very nice. You can use a single drive for DV video, I know. I can’t tell you what you’d get from uncompressed but 400 GB would be your max. Even if the speed is there that’s not a whole lot of space. Someone else here can probably tell you how it would perform, but for the space alone I’d suggest sticking with external storage solutions.

[Bryce Whiteside]

You might find this data rate calculator handy in your quest to determine a size and speed requirements.
https://www.aja.com/ajashare/AJA_Data_Rate_Calculator_102b11.sit

A good resource for SATA’s and harddrive performance
https://www.barefeats.com/

That may lead you to here which is quite popular:
https://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits.php

Sonnet Technologies SATA host adapters:
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo-x_esata44.html
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo-x_esata8.html

SeriTek/1SEN2 External Dual Drive
Enclosure and Serial ATA PCI adapter Card
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/review_seritek_saraceno.html

Transintl.com SwiftDATA 200
https://www.transintl.com/macupgrades/index.cfm

WiebeTech Micro Storage Solutions – G5Jam+
https://www.wiebetech.com/products/G5Jamplus.php

And one slightly more obscure one:
G5 Drive Bracket – Install 5 Hard Drives Inside Your Apple Power Mac G5
https://www.g5drivebracket.com/

That should get you started,
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[David Jones]

I use a Sonnet Tempo SATA 4+4 PCI card in my dual 2.0 G5,
With a Swift Data 200 internal drive mount kit,
and an external MacGurus Burly 4 drive SATA enclosure.
Aside from my internal boot drive, I have 4 internal, and 4 external, for a total of 8 Maxtor 300GB drives.
The 4 external drives are set raid 0 which is very fast,
and used for uncompressed 10bit video editing, as well as high track count audio sessions in DP.
Internally, I have the drives set as singles, where I use 1 for dedicated sample library storage and playback, 1 for dedicated sound effects and music library storage, 1 as a recording drive for ProTools, which does not like software raids, and 1 drive as a backup.

[Bob Delano]

I use a 500 gig internal SATA (2 x 250 gig drives striped) in the G5 that I purchased through promax, no serious problems. They add a bracket that will hold up to three more drives, meaning I can still add two more drives (another 500 gig SATA package)and still have my seperate boot drive. I have recently digitized a full one-hour clip at 10-bit uncompressed via the AJA IO.

In the field I use the G-Raid SATA firewire, with two external SATA enclosures (500 gig each, with two 250 gig drives striped as a RAID in each). They work well, although I find myself waiting for the drives to spin back up after they’ve been idle for a while. This system uses a Blackmagic card, working at 10-bit uncompressed.

Hope this helps.

[Mark Kruger]

I use a Firewire 800 boot drive and have two SATA drives raid 0 inside my G5 dual 2.5. Works great, and I can get a couple of streams of 10-bit video.

Mark

[Richard Scott]

Serial ATA drives (SATAs) are great for video. I have a promax satamax array and I can do 5 streams of uncompressed. I can add another tower for HD.

[Tim Pendergrass]

Bob:
I also have an AJA IO and was wondering if you have any problems with graphics going soft and aliasing once they are rendered, I can only get a clear lower third if I do it in Boris Red, same with photoshop, do I have a setting wrong?
Tim

[Sean Oneil]

I have 8 SATA drives and I edit uncompressed HD without any problems. I got a G5 drive bracket kit which lets you add 3 additional drives internally. The 8 disk array is 2/3rds full and I still get 350 MB/s with the Blackmagic speed test. When the disks were empty, it was about 460 MB/s. I use SoftRAID to make a 128kb RAID0 (Apple’s Disk Utility only does 32kb).

Initially I had a Sonnet 4+4. Whatever you do, for dear life, do NOT use Maxtor drives with a Sonnet card or the Highpoint RocketRaid. It’s a known yet little mentioned problem. If you already have Maxtor drives, do NOT get a Sonnet. Instead get two 4-port Firmtek cards. Firmtek cards, on the other hand, have issues with Hitachi drives (but they will at least warn you of this before buying their products- unlike Sonnet).

[Bob Delano]

Tim-

Not sure what’s happening with your graphics. I haven’t experienced that problem. Most of my graphics are built outside the box, either on a chyron or with pgotoshop, then imported as targa files. What resolution are you working in, and what’s the construction process for your graphics?

Bob

[David Jones]

“Whatever you do, for dear life, do NOT use Maxtor drives with a Sonnet card”

We have been running this configuration just fine!
The only problems that I have heard about were a few random instances of drives in raids not mounting upon boot,
which were cleared up by changing out SATA cables.