[Jay Wolf]

I just talked to a guy from a pro photo/video shop I’ve done business with before and asked him about options for RAID systems.
He mentioned a LaCie RAID system called LaCie Biggest Quadra that consists of an array of 4 disks- RAID 0, 0+1,5 and 5+something(?). Incredibly enough it has FW400, 800 AND ESata connections!
2 TB for around 1K- that is very, very attractive. Will have to get the PCI-card but that’s 100,- at the most.

I know LaCie is not the professional’s Best Friend -at least not for the last few years- but this system comes with a 3 year warranty and coming from a Maxtor 300 gig harddrive, this seems like a perfect first step into the world of RAID.

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

[JeremyG] “If I were you, I’d stay away from FW800 and stripe two SATA drives together. Get yourself a Sonnet PCI card and a port multiplied enclosure with two drives. When you are ready to expand, buy more drives, put them in the enclosure, back up your media, restripe and then you have more capacity.

Jeremy”

I was just looking at the G-tech FW800 option- 2 drives striped together in an enclosure because the LaCie’s get such bad reviews… now you’re telling me I should stay away from them… 🙁

Can you give me a couple of options for the ‘port multiplied enclosure’ that work well with the Sonnet S-Ata card? Sorry to ask but here in the Netherlands we don’t have as many goodies as you do in the States… (and what do you think about the CalDigit system I mentioned in an earlier post?)

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

[walter biscardi] “Get yourself a FW800 RAID at the very least. Two drives striped together will work better than a single drive. A single drive for video editing is never a good solution.”

I just looked at 2 x 1TB LaCie Disks (FW800). Thing is, my Quad has only one FW800 port. Can I hook up the two LaCies to eachother without a problem or do they both need a separate controller ie FW card?

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

[Jason P] “If you’re using an internal drive then even moving to something like a G-Tech G-SATA or, if you can stump up the 2kUSD, a G-SpeedES will make a very noticeable difference, even if you’re only doing HDV/DV. 300 gigs is small nowadays, and as Walter states, filling them up will make a big difference in performance. If you’re on a really tight budget, a decent FW800 drive will make a difference (you’d need to move some of your media across and relink it) but, as you’re HDV (and using the FW bus for ingest of media) I’d be inclined to move to SATA – buy yourself a SATA card and external drive unit.”

I’ve been calling around but this store tells me the G-Tech system is only for Mac Pro’s.
His only option was a RAID 5 CallDigit system with 5 400 gig disks and the eSatacard, all for around 1800. Do you know anything about this system?

Your suggestion to buy the SATA card and the external drive, do you mean a single drive or something like the CallDigit system- or can I make a raid with an internal AND external drive?

(I’m also thinking about buying a 1TB Seagate barracuda ES 7200, 32mb internal drive and a 1 TB lacie external drive for backup. That would be the least expensive option and would at least take care of the drive filling up…)

I appreciate all of your input,

Wolf

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

[JeremyG] “FCP’s rt is dependent on fast drives to help crunch rt. Without them, your system is profiled as more slow. If there’s no fast drives to write a buffer to, then FCP can’t crunch as fast.

Jeremy”

I’ve always worked with regular drives in my system- one for the apps and one for the media and very rarely experienced this ‘clogging’.
But I guess my projects are becoming more demanding in terms of graphics. I like the idea of a RAID but 5K is a lot of money for me. My business is growing but not that big- yet!

Can you -or someone else- answer the questions I asked about a larger drive or letting the drive fill up to 75% max?

Or is there some sort of ‘inbetween’ option?

Thanks for the help,

Wolf

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

[Arniepix] “Next time, don’t insert the template until you’ve nearly locked your edit. If you didn’t have the template to worry about, you wouldn’t have needed to render as much. Or, you can put your photos over the template, but keep the template’s track turned off.”

Not a bad idea- I like to see what I’m doing with all the elements in place but I’ll definitely give it a try next time. Thanks.

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

[JeremyG] “What kind of media drives do you have now?”

I’m a little embarrassed to say it’s just a single drive; an ordinary 300 gig Maxtor harddrive- nothing special.
I work with HDV and DV (and without having read your review of the Sonnet: keep getting an error page when I want the printable version) – do I really need a RAID-system or will a larger drive suffice? (I can backup my projects to my current firewire drives.) Or should I just make sure my drive doesn’t fill up beyond 75%, as Walter said?

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

Thanks, Ben.

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

Thanks, but png, tiff, psd, none of them worked…

I ignored the tutorial instructions and copied the logo to a new document. Alpha channel works!?

Got to get some basic photoshop lessons soon…

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2

[Jay Wolf]

It’s a known bug. Mine does the same thing. Press Cmd-F12 twice and it usually goes away. (for a while, at least) Sometimes it doesn’t happen for a while but during the editing of my current project, for instance, it happens all the time and it is very distracting and VERY annoying.

I talked to Matrox about it 4 months or so ago and the tech guy said it apparently is not on the top list of priorities. Which, in my opinion, is another way of saying ‘we don’t know how to fix it’. And yes, I agree, pretty sloppy for a $1000 machine…

I had hoped that with the new firmware the issue was solved.

Come on, Matrox!

Wolf

G5 Quad, 3.5 Gig RAM, OS 10.4.10, FCS 2