7 HD's inside a mac pro

[samsc]

Does not work the way you imagine.

The operating system, and quicktime are 'single threaded', meaning adding more discs doesnt do anything.
Frame access is sequential. Not sumultaneous.

And the overall performance is as slow as the slowest disc -

I have tested this. and continue to test - in case apple changes the way things work.
At the moment - it doesnt.

[SourceChild]

Yes Richard,
I found out more about this as I looked into it. Nevertheless, it would still make a plausible solution for having a SCSI based RAID Stripe set internally. However, I am looking into several different SCSI controllers to see about solutions with larger data buffers.
Compared to an xServe RAID running SATA disks, a SCSI raid will always have faster disk seek times but it's a matter of eliminating the controller bottleneck. Obviously this is the advantage of the xServeRAID but I would prefer to find a way to have an encapsulated single machine solution for doing HD files.

Give me your feedback on the use of internal SCSI Raids and what cards you've used. Have you tried a 4 disk stripe or just a typical 2 disk stripe?
One thought is to use two SCSI controllers that will do hardware striping and then use OSX to perform a software stripe across two controllers.

[samsc]

there is only 1 source of PCIe scsi cards for mac? atto?

you want something that works. get an xserve raid. even with just 4 drives.

messing with scsi raids isnt fun. your thinking is getting too complex. with no performance gain.

[tharding]

The xServe is so low fuss. I have the system that Richard describes and I can run 2 Cats from it without a fibre channel router.

The extra features of the xserve that are worth noting are:

1. Fibre channel is so straight forward. One cable to connect which can run substantial distances if required.

2. Dual redundant power supplies, Cooling systems, Battery backup for cache.

I had a G5 die on me the other day and I was able to swap it out in 10 minutes because all I had to do was swap a card and install the Catalyst software. If I had a machine loaded with drives and cards this wouldn't be so simple.

I think you would find that the XServe is very cost competitive when compared to that much SCSI hardware.

cheers

Toby

[RedLightning]

I am in the process of setting up my system and was looking at the option of 1x250gig system drive 3x500gig 10000 RPM SATA drives using Apple disk utility to set up the RAID.
Primarily a non-HD system but I will be buying the Blackmagic Multibridge Pro...

-s

[tharding]

Have a look at SoftRAID. It comes fairly highly recommended as an alternative to the Apple RAID utility.

Cheers

Toby

[GideonKiers]

Hello there,

I'm working on a theatre project which needs a 18,5 meter panoramic projection. There are quite a few approaches to tackling this challenge. Indeed, most of them highly speculative ...

The plan at the moment is to have 4 projectors, driven by two new 2,66 Intel macs and catalyst v4. Each mac 2 GB (4x512mb) ram and an ati x1900 grphx card.

The resolution on the media files should preferably be 1024x768, but could also be 768x576. Codec would be photo-jpeg at 60 or 70 %.

Setup for each output would be pretty standard, 2 layers of video and possibly a masking (grphcs) layer. Hoping to use the new seamless panorama features in v.4.

• First question : Would a 10k sata disk be fast enough to drive those ± 4 layers of video + 2 masking layers for each machine ?

• Second question : Would it be possible to do the 4 outputs from one computer with the ati card and two dualhead2go's ? It would mean ± 8 layers of 768x576 photojpeg 60% video to four outputs via one machine.

• Third question : In case the dualhead2go solution has a chance of working, would it be possible to use one large (3072x576) quicktime for the four outputs ?

• Last question : Not having to render masks into the quicktime(s) would save us _a lot_ of time. This would mean moving one or multiple masks over the four screens in real-time. Would this be possible in the dualhead2go option ?

That's it for now, am sure there are more issues to it though

Thanks !

Gideon