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.Originally Posted by thomasrotten
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