[real]

Hows it going,
I have a question about getting a new system for working with video and and photoshop. Are there any pro users that work with uncompressed video after effects, fcp, commtion, lightwave. I would like to have the fastest disk speed i can afford with will be ATA drives. I'd like to say away from useing SCSI because of cost if I can do it. I'd like to for two RAID arrys one for source footage and one for rendering. I have heard that the ATA drives don't raid very well. is there anyone out there that has such a system and has sme pointers.I 've looked into the sonnet raid card for forming a raid for the machine. I would like to have a sustained tranfer rate of 35mb/sec. Im i dreaming with the ATA setup oe is this possible.
thanks for the the help
I know this type of post is up offen.

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making the impossible
possible

Real- Pony up the money for a 4 36 gig Quantum Ultra Wide LVD/160's and a dual-channel ATTO card, a case with a good fan and UW/160 cable+terminator. Run a 2-drive RAID internally to the ATTO, and a two-drive external RAID, also to the ATTO; you'll SAVE money in the long run by having fewer dropped frames, lower CPU overhead (SCSI Level 0 RAID won't touch your CPU for help, ever, unlike EIDE RAIDs; this is especially important when rendering/digitizing, etc.), and you'll be able to scale MUCH more easily in terms of disk space/RAID configs. Options of scale are very important, as you probably know in NLE, etc. I've been doing using RAIDs on Macs since 1992, using M100, Avid Media Composer, etc., as well as Commotion, LightWave, AfterEffects (since CoSa owned it!), and you'll need obver 35 MB/sec because of the overhead involved; more like a reliable 55-75 MB/sec.. Uncompressed video (D1) is a bear, and you need some headroom there, believe me. The drives in question were just on DealMac yesterday fro 3bills and change each; throw in an ATTO card and Level 0 striping software (I'd use ATTO's; it lets you adjust page modes, etc., to a degree found in few other RAID software packages). If you go the aforementioned SCSI route, dropped frames. even at D1, will be very rare, indeed. I'd also invest in a cheap but good IBM 60 GXP 75 gig EIDE 7200 drive for non-video storage/scratch disk needs and just throw RAM at P-shop to keep disk activity to a minimum; video RAIDS should stay just that, for reliability's sake.

Yeah, it's more expensive, but EIDE RAIDS are not ready for prime time yet, at least not for what your needs are and will be. Consider the extra cost an investment towards keeping your word to clients on deadlines, and for the inevitable "over the shoulder" editing sessions with clients you can't afford NOT to impress = ).

crh, CCNA

Real, Take 2-

Just a little 411 on transfer rates, RAID and otherwise: SUSTAINED transfer rates of 35-55MB/sec. are what you'll need for effortless D1 digitizing, BURST rates are what usually get quoted by manufacturers, VAR's etc., as it's a MUCH higher rate than sustained reads and writes. During sustained reads and writes, there can be no 'unscheduled', or random, 'thermal recalibration', which can cause nasty hiccups in the data transfer. Good SCSI drives of 7200+ RPM (and I suggest 10k rpm as a MINMUM spindle speed here, as well as a minimum 2MB cache; I don't recall if the Quantums I mentioned fir this bill, but the reliable third/forth generation Seagate Cheetahs DO.

Happy DIG'ing,

-crh

Also, SCSI makes NO demands on CPU cycles for its operation; just as it should be so that multiple operations can occur to/from disk, and the CPU retains all its horsepower to render, etc.

[cube-dude]

Transfering to the Multimedia & DV forum

[real]

Sorry once again cube leaning the right places for the topics. thanks for the help chumley. You put the reasons why to get SCSI is better in a different manner thanks for the time