[Tristan Summers]

I have questions about the LACIE HD box. If it is SATA2, why is it so slow? 187 is gonna be a pig doing HD. Does it have a hardware RAID? If so can you not use 2 of them in more complicated parity based RAIDS?

For much less money you can build your own 8 drive SATA RAID. I am interested in peoples experiences of doing this. I have been advised to get as fast and cheap a drive as possible and always back up often no matter what drive set up you have.

[Tristan Summers]

Trouble with Lacie is only a 2 port card…
Firmtek do an excellent 2 drive enclosure box. they do a bundle with a 4 port card. That gets you about 230MB/s just enough for HDTV

For external, I’d get 4 dual boxes from them , and an 8 port card from Sonnet. Make sure you get good cables from them as well.

For internal, I’d look at Max Connect (https://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.display&category_id=306)
which helps fit 7 drives in a G5 and offers a cheaper plastic version, cheapest SATA expansion I have found.

, and then if you don’t have the Nvidia monster card, the G5Jam cn fit another two behind PCI cards so mac of SATA boxerama and then what the heck get an external card as well and stick another 8 on and get over 500 MBs!!
(Mind you, am having troubles with bus speeds to my PCI-X card…)