SeriTek card & SATA 2 drives gives Media 100i 300 MB/sec transfer rate

[Bill Sergio]

Since nobody answered my post here the only thing I could do was to buy it and try it myself. I bought the SeriTek Card and 4-bay enclure and tested with Hitachi SATA-2 and it works PERFECTLY in my G4 running at 1.42GHz.

I have Media 100i xr boards with the latest software. I was concerned I might get overheating but I have not had any problem with excess heat.

I can digitize UNcompressed video with NO problem.

It cost me a total of $900 and I got the board, the enclosure and 4 Hitachi SATA-2 500gig drives on eBay .. that’s 2,000 GIGS of removable storage at over 300Mb/sec!

Fireware 800 is TERRIBLE, the connections get loose and you have digitizing problems.

[Joe Hayden]

Thanks for sharing…

Good luck with the new set-up.

[Bill Sergio]

Hi,

I am on a very tight budget and all of the other hard drive options were too expensive!

Some Media 100 resellers were pushing storage solutions that cost $6,000 !

I got 500gig SATA-2 drives but you can also use the Hitachi 250 GB SATA-2 drives and these sell on eBAy brand new for only $117 each. The engineer I spoke with said that they had tested all the major brands of drives and that Hitachi was the best and Samsung was the worst.

[Christopher Kinsman]

Do you have the links to the ebay seller? Did they say anything about seagate drives. I’ve used them pretty exclusively but the price you qouted sounds pretty hard to pass up. Thanks for your post! Best Regards… Chris

[Bill Sergio]

Hi,

I don’t have the links anymore but when I was researching prices I found that the best prices was for the Hitachi 25oGig SATA-II drive, they cost in stores abot $109 each and I almost bought them but I found one auction on eBay and emailed the seller and got a deal on new 500gig drives.

I spoke with one of the engineers who trested all of the popular makes and they said they best drive was Hitachi, the others were “okay” but I was warned NOT to buy Samsung–some kind of real tech problem with video that I didn’t fully understand.

If you get 3 of the Hitachi 250Gig SATA-II drives that should be enough capacity for most project? Remember that you can always add or remove dtives! That gives you over 300 Mb/sec!
And even in the G4 where the bus is shared by the PCI boards that is more than enough for uncompressed video in the Media 100i xr option.

I was surprised that I didn’t have any overheating–but the 1.42GHz model G4’s have the newer and large heat sinks and fan. I also added heat sinks to the memory chips which seems to have made a BIG difference in keeping the computer cool.