Thanks. I am here to help. Raid setups are often thought to be expensive. That has alot to do with scsi drives and external raids. Do some digging and you should be able to get a 160gb raid 0 for less than $200. That is internal of course. It is just as effective though. You do not need a "raid" card, just an sata card. You would use a software to create your raid. You can use OSX's or SoftRaids. Now if you are going to use os9, you will need the SoftRaid. Apple's software raid is not recognized in os9. I love mine. It is super fast and really 160 GB is plenty. I have 50 used for storage and I edited one and a half hours of footage this past weekend. I still had plenty of room. Most people think that you need multiple 300 gb drives to make a good video raid. That is just not true unless you are editing feature films and are using raid 5 or above. Hope this helps you out-my two articles should help inform you also.
Thanks for the brownie point!
-maestro

Maestro:
I did a search on MacMod and came up with one article by you about building an internal SATA raid in a G5. I just skimmed it and to tell you the truth there was stuff in it that I didn't understand. Like something about a "striped" something. I assume it's not a striped bass. But I'll read it again. By the way that article looked a lot like this one on amug.org

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/firmtek/

Same concept, I assume.

What do you think about the idea of putting in one ATA100 internall just for grins and building an external SATA raid with FirmTek's PCI card (SeriTek/1SE2) and nifty 2 bay enclosure (SeriTek/1EN2)? They say the card is OS9 & 10 compatible.
I admit it's another 2/3 hundred bucks but I like the idea of a Hot Swap external.

Ahhh! I just miskeyed and lost may looong ass explanation for you. Lets see if i can narrow it down. Are you really gonna be hot swapping drives? I am trying to get Firmtek to send a tester of it as I write this. Really though, I would go internal. You have the space and they are still an easy swap in a Mac case. "Striped" means Raid 0. By the way that was not my article. Check the news archive, these are not mod guides, they were written in my weekly harware articles.

-maestro

It is called build a sata raid 0 from January 2005.

Post edited by: maestro, at: 2005/03/15 15:43

Maestro:

Re: Your article; found it, reading it. Thanks

Re: Hot swapping; Well other than the fact that is sounds a lot like an alternative lifestyle that would certainly make mine more exciting yet better left to another forum, I guess the answer is I wouldn't do it that often. It's more an issue of when I buy my next Mac ( a G5 or G6?) how much will I strip out of it. And will it be easier to just pop out a card and disconnect the cable versus, remove all those drives. I dunno. Maybe you're right.

There is no doubt that a external raid 0 is sexy and cool. It also makes it more expensive.
As you work on your Mac, you will see it is so easy to install and remove stuff. If you follow
my article on sata raid 0, I think you would be extremely happy with it. I know that I love it.
My next hardware addition includes a Raptor 10k 74GB main drive off of a second sata card.
That is going to be sweet. Now if you can afford an external Raid. Why not choose this setup:

Western Digital Raptor 10,000 rpm sata main drive 74 GB (I have seen it go for $155)
Firmtek pci sata card
2 x Western Digital Raptor 10,000 rpm sata main drives for a 148 GB Raid 0

Now that is some serious drive power. Even better than SCSI, some may disagree with that,
but try living with SCSI drives, they are a pain.

Good Luck
-maestro

maestro:

no offense but how can you argue cost of external when your advice has him up in the several hundred range? it doesn't seem like he is doing heavy pro level video. any standard ata drive that 7200rpm will do fine with video. digital video only needs 4-5mb a sec and any ata these days will do a few times faster than that.

overkill is what kills bank accounts. get what you need and no more. that is logical..

zenstate:
No worries. Maestro has been right on target for me and has talked me down off the high priced ledge a couple of times. His advice has been quite tempered and patient. I understood where he was going with the "wouldn't it be nice" suggestion.
I may have given the impression that I was not doing Pro-level video work and technically that is correct. But I have done it in the past at a corporate level and I'm getting my personal system built up for the challenge. I have put in 5 grand, cutting corners as well as I can, and that's just camera and software. So don't worry, he's targeting my needs fairly closely.

I appreciate both of your comments. There are alot of possibilities for hard drive setups.
As I said before, hard drives are the bottle necks of computer hardware. One needs to
buy the fastest with the most throughput possible. Video editing is very taxing on hardware. Video work involves waiting for the computer to catch up to you quite often.
In pro editing rooms, you will see huge raid setups and super fast computers because you
can do more in real time. When you have hours of footage, the faster you can go, the more customers you can serve. I myself am not a "pro editer", but I am a modding junkie with a need, a need for speed.

The more informed you are, the better choices you can make.
-maestro