Well, here’s the thing. I swapped out the Tiger internal HDD and put in the OS X 10.3.9/QT 6.5.2/FCP 4.5/Kona 2 1.0.5 driver HDD and I get six streams of Uncompressed 10bit SD playback from the four SATA drives, no frames dropped.
I put the Tiger/QT 7.01/FCP 5.02/Latest Kona drivers HDD back in and I get TWO streams of Uncompressed 10bit SD.
WTF is up with that?!?! The metal is ALL THE SAME. Only the software has changed. Who is the culprit, though? Is it the OS, QT, the Seritek SATA card, AJA or FCP. My money is on FCP or QT as the OS allows the Kona diskwhacker app to batter the SATA stripe at 236MB/s but FCP is only getting to 74MB/s before it falls apart.
Am I glad I bought that copy of Pro Video support from Apple a few weeks ago; looks like I am about to get my money’s worth…