[Bob Zelin]

if you are in the US, call Ron Amborn at Maxx Digital (714) 374 4944. He is a good source for SATA complete systems. You can ABSOLUTELY run an ATTO UL4D card, a BMD card and a SATA card in the same chassis. Two SATA drives stripped in RAID 0 will do 8 and 10 bit SDI uncompressed and DVCProHD. You CANNOT use a single SATA drive. Put the BMD card in the PCI-X slot (slot 5), and the ATTO and SATA cards in slots 3 and 4. You can start with the cheap Firmtek 2 port SATA card, and 2 500 Gig SATA drives to give you 1 Terabyte of SATA storage. In the future, as you get more comftorable with this, you can go to the Sonnet X4P card, which uses the more expensive ($500) port multiplier chassis, which you can stick 5 drives into – for a total of 2.5 terabytes per box. You can plug in 4 boxes to this card, for a total of 10 terabytes. But if you want to start small, 2 SATA drives in the Firmtek box, with the 2 port SATA card from Firmtek will work just fine – and 1 TB of storage is a nice way to start for just over $1000.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

PULL OUT THE FIREWIRE CARD NOW and try it. I don’t give a crap if you need it, many of these FW cards slow down the buss speed. We can discuss a fix for you, once you yank out your FW card, and try it again.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

the AVID Meridians, and original AVID Adrenalines were 8 bit resolution. This has been the industry standard for years, so with conventional Beta, 8 bit is “good enough” – if it’s good enough for the networks. 10 bit has advantages in compositing, and new AVID Adrenalines operate at 10 bit, but you are JUST FINE operating at 8 bits. No one will EVER reject a tape from you becuase you were working in 8 bit uncompressed.

Bob Zelin
ps – however, that 99c mouse pad has to go !

[Bob Zelin]

your card slots are wrong. The Kona and the ATTO must be in different busses, and your Ethernet is in the PCI-X slot. You did not say what ATTO card you had – the UL3D or UL4D. REmove the Ethernet card (or Firewire card, or whatever it is). Put the ATTO in slot 3 or 4, and put the AJA Kona in the PCI-X slot (if you have a UL4D, reverese what I just said). The PCI-X slot is the last slot, furthest away from the AGP Graphics card.

Now try it. If you still have issues, your HUGE Firmware might need to be updated. You can download the AJA Kona System Test to test your HUGE drive performance – you should get WAY OVER 120 mb/sec with your HUGE using the AJA Kona System test.

Now, as for your Ethernet or Firewire card that you “really really need in there” – it is probably slowing down your buss speed, which is causing this problem. Need another ethernet card – buy a MAC Quad that comes with 2 ethernet ports.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Neil is correct and I am wrong. The Apple XServe RAID uses Hitachi 7200RPM
ATA-133 with an 8MB buffer. But my point is that they STILL BLOW UP. Sorry – they do. I have clients with XServe RAID’s that have never had a problem as well, but I have seen too many failures.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Different people have different experiences with products. If Lacie products were terrible, Apple would not represent them in their stores. I see Lacie drives everywhere in Florida. I just have not had good experiences with them, with my client base. I know Roger Mabon, and G-Tech drives are teriffic, and I have had much better luck with G-Tech (and other companies) than Lacie.

SATA has better performance than FW800 – and this applies to ALL manufacturers of SATA products, including Lacie and G-Tech. I only use EXTERNAL SATA drives, and I use SATA because they COST LESS than more expensive Fibre and SCSI arrays from HUGE and Medea. To me, there is nothing like a HUGE drive array, but most people just don’t want to spend the money today, and want cheap – and SATA is that cheap solution.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Firmtek is selling a PCMCIA SATA card for our applications. The 2 port Firmtek SATA card supports SSC, but the 4 port card (that uses the Intel chip and intel driver) does NOT support SSC. Firmtek is working on a new 4 port card. Sonnet cards support SSC.

It is VERY CONFUSING to determine which drives do and do not have SSC – the same Seagate drives do and do not support SSC, with the SAME MODEL #, depending on the SUFFIX in the part #. This is why you should go to a VAR to buy your stuff, and not “Joes cheapo internet SATA drives” – because Joes cheapo will NOT take back your drives if they don’t work because of SSC. Go to a great Value Added Reseller, like Maxx Digital, Virtual Media, Pro Max, or other companies that SUPPORT their customers. YES, you will pay more per drive, but is this aggrivation worth it to you ?

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

I am amused by your post – I wish I had this 3 days ago.
I just suffered thru this SSC nightmare, and wrote a private
email to AJA about it. People who say “oh, you should build your own
SATA arrays – it’s easy” have not had the good fortune to run into this
nightmare, where everything stops working, and you say to yourself “what the
hell is going wrong here !!!”.

Thanks for your post. Most people won’t read it or understand it, but it
is incredibly important.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

No budget limit – no question – get a Discreet Logic Inferno, running on an SGI computer. This is a teriffic product. And while you are at it, I could use a new Ferrari – if you get me the Ferrari, I will come and install the Discreet Inferno for you for free (you did say no budget limit).

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

you are absolutely correct (and soon add the Panasonic BT-LH2600 26″ monitor after NAB – but please remember that this series of monitors has a lower resolution than 1920×1200 (or even 1366×768).

Bob Zelin