I have been using 4 Raptors in a Apple 0stripe set for 6 months now and it has worked flawless on my machine. I am able to play 720p HD compressed to half at full speed accross 3 layers (2 at full speed and 1 jumping around from 15 to 30). I am also able to play one layer of 1080p PhotoJpeg compresses to half.
I have no heat problems with my personal test setup. Unfortunately, it is a bit jury rigged but here are the details. I have 2 drives in the apple and seritek 1s2 card that connects 2 2 30" unshielded SATA Cables to 2 more drives set in their own Metal Gear cases fashioned to accept SATA input. I Chose the Metal Gear external Harddrive boxes because they are for the most part, open, allowing the drives heat sinks to do their job.
I have used other hardware such as the SATA maxi system that would crash the system running HD after only 20 min. I have also tested the system using different external cases which were fine also in an air conditioned room.
The trick is not to disturb the G5 airflow at all. By opening up a PCI slot and leaving it open, you will drastically disturb the airflow. I fashioned a PCI cover with a little wedge shaved out of it for the SATA cables to fit out of. This works well.
I hasten to add though, The Attotech UL4d and a Huge systems Dual channel U320 or any dual U320 drive system will give you data transfer up to 500mb/s, depending on how full the drives are, for over $5,000 - an investment I would consider to make for multiple High Def layers and storage. With 4 Raptors, you can get speeds over 200 mb/s for $1200.00 including cases but you will only get 288gb of data after the format and os and have to deal with SATA cables.
You can still get speeds over 200mb/s with standard 7200 rpm SATA or ata drives if they are properly striped and partitioned so that only the prime area of each disk is accessable. This is the area of each disk minus all of the inner tracks and part of the outer tracks. You can then turn these drives into 1 large SCSI drive with the right case and hardware. This is what Huge Systems, Promaxx, and a myriad of other high end storage manufacturers do. They don't use a bunch of scsi disks in those cases, they are mostly ata converted to scsi using hardware and software.
The ATTO UL4D (the scsi interface card you use to hook your mac to your SCSI drives) is suprisingly faster and better than the UL3d. Most people think that the difference is only marginal but the difference is nearly 3 times better perfomance as per my disscussions with Attotech and Huge Systems at NAB.
After seeing and evaluating all of the options, I've concluded that the best way to go, considering the fact that technology is advancing so rapidly and that there is a new technology called Xsan that will drastically change your appoach to high speed data storage, I would personally would go with the *buy the biggest and best* mentality, because with my needs, I will soon require it. If you aren't pushing the limits of the system or don't see yourself using HD in the near future, you can still benefit from Xsan and a huge fast SCSI system.
For a cheap "need it now" high speed solution, just get the raptors. They are cheap ($240) and don't require a G5Jam if you don't want one. 4 of them make a huge difference over 2, but again, if you are only running DV content which is a horribly compressed, discolored codec, then it's not worth sweating.
Each scenario has thier own requirements and pitfalls.
Christian Choi
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Originally Posted by litemover
