RAID/P-ATA card advice

[dex22]

Hi all.

Quicksilver 2002, 867MHz, 1.5GB, 10.4.6, 120GB OSX and 600GB RAID

I'm editing a huge video project. I have two matched 300Gb drives that I've created a striped array from in disk utility, with 256KB blocks, because it's video. 20 hours of DV.

I've placed the drives on the primary i/f, set to cable select, on a Quicksilver G4 which does have large drive support. When copying from the OS X drive, which is on the secondary i/f with the superdrive - it works slowly there, but I just need fast video - the RAID array occasionally reports that it hasn't been properly put away, and dismounts.

I figure the solution to this is to buy a P-ATA IDE PCI card, put the OS X drive back on the motherboard primary i/f and put each of the 300s on its own channel of the P-ATA card.

However, there are four or five on the market and they all look the same. Soooo, bearing in mind what I am doing, and my limited indie filmmaker budget, which would you recommend? Or does anyone have a spare one they'd like to sell me? 🙂

Dave
www.plasticuser.com

 

[disconap]

I personally like Sonnet. Their products seem to be consistantly good. That said, I don't currently use anything sonnet. My ATA IDE controller is from SIIG, and it seems to work with my RAID setup, though I don't have both drives running through it for space/airflow reasons (I ended up putting the other RAID drive in the Zip slot/optical drive cable)...

 

[dex22]

Thanks Disconap - card ordered. 🙂

 

[disconap]

Any time! Let us know how it turns out for you...

 

[dex22]

Soooo...

My ATA-133 RAID card arrived today.

It works great!

My original is a WD 120GB 7200RPM 2Mb cache drive which managed sustained large block sequential writes of 50MB/sec.

My striped RAID is two Maxtor 300GB 7200RPM 16MB cache drives which achieve a steady rate of 105MB/sec on the same test. Both tests do uncached writes, so the 16MB cache on the two drives may make even better real-world improvements when streaming video.

I am very happy. Thank you.

 

[disconap]

You are more than welcome, glad to hear it worked out. 🙂

IMO, aside from the obvious RAID benefits, you are also gaining 14mb of cache per drive over your original one, which in a RAID setup is even more effective. For future purposes, I highly suggest never buying a drive with less than 8mb of cache, preferably 16 (though 8 is easily workable), 2mb is just too slow...

Also, the best test is simply your results. I use a lot of modded gear, so I find tests (like Xbench) are wildly inaccurate. I just go with my gut; if the machine is doing what I need it to at an acceptable (or preferably impressive) rate, I am happy. I'm a firm believer that numbers are impressive, but nothing beats getting what you need out of a machine. 😉