Mac Pro with SCSI or SATA for content?

[RuedigerH]

Richard,

are there actual recommendations from your side regarding MAC PRO and SCSI-systems OR several S-ATA drives?

What is the direction your are working on?

Thank You
Ruediger

[samsc]

In general - for more layers scsi is better.

for less layers - and maybe Hidef where data throughput is important - raid will be better.

Still collecting data on which SATA drives to test.

some tests here:

http://www.barefeats.com/quad08.htm

[thomasrotten]

Hi there.. I can strongly recommand the firmtek 4 drive s-ata bay... With the new model you can put in the new s-ata II disk in. They have the new 3Gb/s interface and if you stripp the 4 drives togeather it is no problem to run 10 layers of video. www.firmtek.com

[samsc]

did you test this yourself?

you rely on firmtek benchmarks - for this information?

[tharding]

Hi there.. I can strongly recommand the firmtek 4 drive s-ata bay... With the new model you can put in the new s-ata II disk in. They have the new 3Gb/s interface and if you stripp the 4 drives togeather it is no problem to run 10 layers of video. www.firmtek.com

I run the earlier version of the Firmtek Dual Drive Bay which is SATA 1. When I create 4 drive RAID using WD 74g Raptors I can at best run 4 to 6 layers of DV.

However I also have an Xserve RAID. The major difference is that the caching of the Xserve gives me smooth playback without a dropped frame of at least 5 layers if not 6. I find the SATA RAIDs will drop the occasional frame even though the HUD is telling me I am running at 25 fps on all layers. This can occur even if I am only running one layer. You can even hear the drives make a slight noise when they lose there place.

With SATA II the disk speed hasn't changed just the bandwidth. Without a major increase in disk speed and particularly caching I can't see how ten layers is possible without dropping frames. There is such a big difference between playing back multiple layers in a video editing program such as Final Cut which uses caching and render files versus Catalyst.

Having said all that I would be more than happy to be proved wrong but I find the Xserve has given the best performance so far of the solutions I have tried.

Cheers

Toby

[samsc]

i agree with toby -

but someone sometime might come up with an amazing caching algorithm that makes it work better.

[thomasrotten]

No the benchmark tests is done with the blackmagic speed test and with 4 maxtor S-ATA II 300 GB disk stripped to raid 0 i get a preformance of 275 MB/s.....

best regards

thomas