[Anne Mills]

Also check out the CalDigit VR, it’s a two drive system, quad interface and supports RAID 0 and 1. It has an environmental monitor and an LCD display which is nice. You can easily use it with your setup, plus they sell an express card for your macbook Pro.

Check it out here:

https://www.caldigit.com/CalDigit_VR/

If you have any questions give them a call they’re really informative.

Found it on Macworld and it says the 1.2TB starts at $499, which is a great price.

https://www.macworld.com/article/138592/2009/02/caldigitvr.html?lsrc=rss_main

Anne

[Anne Mills]

The G speed es box without its 2314 PCI-E card is only a port multiplier box. The g speed es box will only function as a regular port multiplier box which will let you set the volume as raid 0 or JBOD. It will also work with any port multiplier PCI-e card, such as Sonet, Caldigit or firmtek. Not only firmtek. If your purpose is only getting a raid 0 machine with an express card solution on your laptop, there are plenty of solutions out there that can get you the same speed as a 4 drive g speed es with much lower pricing and a much smaller size. Under the express card, it really doesn’t make differnce between 2 drive raid 0 or 4 drive raid 0, it can’t go faster than the speed of the express bus anyway.

[Anne Mills]

Maybe its time to upgrade to a hardware disk array, the G5 CPU is not as fast as the latest MacPro, and hardware has a dedicated CPU that will free up the G5 CPU and speed up the overall performance of the final cut system.

-Anne

[Anne Mills]

Alex

I believe both the Evo2 and CalDigit are hardware RAIDs. I just want to reiterate that RAID 5 doesn’t equal a hardware RAID. I do recommend questioning the vendor just to see how competent they are in their product knowledge. It also helps to see who you’re dealing with and how much they know about video editing so you can get the proper support.

-Anne

[Anne Mills]

Hello,

I just want to help out and further clarify the difference between hard ware and software RAIDs because the performance level does differ between the two.

When ever you are having doubts about whether it is a hardware RAID ask the vendor two questions Does it have and independent CPU and Does it have an independent cache memory? If the answer is yes to both questions you know you are dealing with a hardware RAID.

Hardware RAIDs have a dedicated CPU this frees up the host system CPU resources to make applications more efficient. Software RAID makes the host work harder because you’re using the host CPU

If it is RAID 5, it does not necessarily mean it is a hardware RAID, there are products that support RAID 5 and are software RAIDs.

Hope this helps!