Quote Originally Posted by 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
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