8 port externals SATA

[jasonrudolph]

Yet another new controller card

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/03/15/tempox/index.php
8 external ports from Sonnet
299

[samsc]

hugh and i tested the xserve raid with fibre channel switch and had pretty good results. more to follow

[jasonrudolph]

I am really interested in those results Richard. At this point in time, what do you think is the best option? Is it still SCSI?

[samsc]

the playback performance wrt number of simultaneous layers is a disc access time issue ( rotational plus seek latency ) and this is variable with all disc drives. scsi seems to have the lowest variability which means playback across multiple layers is more stable.

You need to choose you disc solution with your application in mind- bearing in mind the following:

All layers refer to number of dv codec layers -- photojpeg 50-60% is pretty close to this as well.

The following apply to single drive systems - not arrays:

1. Standard 7200rpm SATA drives are NOT good enough for more than 2 stable layers with dv codecs - because access times are too long, and too variable. And you must NEVER use the system drive to playback files ( unless you want trouble )

2. 10000rpm SATA raptor drives give between about 3 layers at the same time - if you are lucky you might get more.

3. A single 15000rpm or 10000rpm scsi disc - might give you 4 layers.
SCSI discs have different performances ( access times ) to each other - the current fastest according to 'storage review' is the Maxtor 15k AtlasII.

RAIDs:
Raid configurations all have very different design strategies - it is impossible to test them all.

4. The Xserve RAID seems to give us 6/7 layers across a 2 drive RAID, but needs further testing.

5. Hugh claims to have got close to 8 dv layers on his 5 drive scsi system from huge systems.