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Lz0
Oct 3, 2002, 06:24 AM
Is anyone using the ATA 133 Raid cards from either Acard or Sonnet and a coupl'a HD's as a system disc on OSX?

I'm thinking of getting one and a coupl'a fast HD's to improve disc performance.

I do a little video and faster is better as we all know.

Questions:

1. Are there any issues in sleep or waking from sleep?

2. Is there any real performance gain? and if so how much?

Any info or comments from people using this config would be greatly appreciated.



mischief
Oct 3, 2002, 01:44 PM
Originally posted by Lz0
Is anyone using the ATA 133 Raid cards from either Acard or Sonnet and a coupl'a HD's as a system disc on OSX?

I'm thinking of getting one and a coupl'a fast HD's to improve disc performance.

I do a little video and faster is better as we all know.

Questions:

1. Are there any issues in sleep or waking from sleep?

2. Is there any real performance gain? and if so how much?

Any info or comments from people using this config would be greatly appreciated.

1. Yes, until you upgrade the drivers and card firmware. I suggest you gather all the installers at www.versiontracker.com before even opening the package. Sonnet is very good about getting new drivers out.

2. Sorta: I suggest that U use a separate, smaller drive to boot from as systems really don't like booting from RAID volumes. A fast-ass host card will gain you a lot by itself just in getting your disk-speed up to the same as you bus-speed. A G4 Quicksilver (Spring 2002) has a 133Mhz bus and a 66Mhz drive controller. An ATA-133 host card will be a dramatic increase as long as the ATA drives used are equally as fast and preferrably in the high RPM range (7200-10K). U can host 4 drives as paired RAID sets off the Sonnet card. The larger a disk, the slower it's inherent hardware seek time.

The coolest trick for video is a SCSI 160 host card and an external SCSI 160 RAID 5 stack built by LaCie. Fast AND redundant. Plus it doesn't use tower space.