I have a similar situation to Robert Lane's thread concerning capture now.
I need to shoot over 250 1 minute long clips on a stage for a project in a couple of weeks. DVCPro 50 SD is the intended record format. The camera can be tethered so it seems best to go direct to a hard drive, which scares the hell out of me since drives occasionally crash.

Has anyone tried this?
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/silversata.php

The Silversata 2 has two drives in a hardware raid similar to the G-Raid. The difference is that you can switch between Raids 1 and 0 (using the built in controller) and thus be able to do live mirroring in theory. You can also swap the drives out unlike the G-Raid.

If a drive goes down you can pull it out, put a new one in and the box will automatically copy the good drive to the new drive and rebuild the mirror. If you wanted triple back up at the end of the day, pull one drive and let it build another mirror, at least in theory.

It runs off one sata cable from the computer so there is no bottleneck created by feeding two drives off the cardbus slot as you would have in a do-it-yourself mirror.

Thoughts??

I noticed that the dual bay unit also has a USB2 port. Does that mean you could go straight to the drive and bypass Final Cut?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe RAID 1 has some overhead, especially when it comes to writing data. It's faster than a single disk when reading, but writing I think is slow. I'm not sure if this will affect performance in any way with video to disk recording...?

Also, many software-controlled RAID 1 devices may not support hot-swapping a failed drive.

These are all facts I believe to be true in the PC world, but this device may be different. I've never actually used one so I'm not sure. I've also never used any direct-disk recording, and I'm not too familiar with the P2 stuff either, I just thought I would comment on the RAID

I'm very interested in the idea of SATA dual hot swap Raid one systems. They make lots of sense for the HVX

I was told that the Raid 1 will write a little slower than a single drive.
However, perhaps that might be offset by the fact that SATA's are much faster than Firewire 400 to begin with.

Granite digital also sells those systems and also both PCMCIA and PCI externals SATA adapetrs.
The bottleneck for speed in the laptop is the card slot. I don't know if a SATA raid would be slower than a single Firewire drive there.
I would ask Granite and also the place you are looking at. You will ultimately have to test.

I'm reluctanty to invest because I'm a DP not a producer so I need to adapt to what producers will want, but the hot swap SATA idea might be good if it got commonly adopted.



http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/indx_serialata.htm

http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm?Criteria=sata++&x=0&y=0&Manufacturer=

This may be a dumb question but I can't find the answer anywhere, what is the exact workflow if you plug the Panny via firewire directly into a G5? If you put the G5 in another room to quiet the noise do you have to go back and manually start stop the capture each time or can you control it via camera?

Noise from the powerbook is an issue.
You can't go into another room because of the limitations on firewire length which are still not clear to me.

Has anyone tried this?
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/silversata.php

I noticed that the dual bay unit also has a USB2 port. Does that mean you could go straight to the drive and bypass Final Cut?

Hi Gary,

I too am interested in this solution. Currently I'm using the 500GB G-SATA from G-Tech. I like it a lot but the amount of data HD generates I can probably only get one or two projects online at a time. I have been backing up to a USB2 enclosure but the SilverSATA seems to be a more elegant solution. Please let us know what you deiced and how well it works.

Also, regarding capturing data from the HVX Derek West tells how he does it using the G-Drive Q connected directly to the HVX with no computer in post #9 -- http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=62478

Thanks

Well, I decided to go ahead and order the unit since the shoot is coming soon and I need a little time to set it up and test it. I ordered the base unit with no drives (I already have a pair of 300gigs for it). I also ordered their SATA cardbus adapter, an adapter cable to go from the Sata 1 connector to the eSata connector and two extra trays. The extra trays would allow premounting a pair of extra disks in case you ran out of disk space or had a drive failure.

After reading other threads here, I doubt this can be connected directly to the camera as it does not mention any On-the-go capabilities. When I get the unit and it's manual I will check that but it is probably not going to work that way.

I have read that there is some extra overhead in RAID one but I don't think it will be a problem with any of the DVCPro codecs. The drive specs claim hot swapping as long as disks are not in software RAIDs, but I don't think it's an issue on a shoot to stop and power-off to change disks. It's not that much different than changing tapes during a shoot, putting down bars and tone, etc.

Betsy, I don't know about the G5 remote but I am looking into some products from this company, P.I. Engineering.

http://www.piengineering.com/

They make X-Keys USB mappable keyboards. I am not sure how long a USB cable can be run to get the computer in another room. They also make a big button that might be useable but requires an interface box.
Check the bottom of this page:

http://www.piengineering.com/xkeys.php?PHPSESSID=32c608b0927bcddc4803a874daf3cee5

Chuck, I have two G-Raid FW800 units which work great but you can't change the internal RAID. I also own two FirmTek SeriTek Sata enclosures for my G5 . They work great but you can't mirror them without sending duplicate data down two sata cables which I think would choke the cardbus on the Powerbook. The Silversata requires just one SATA cable similar to the way firewire G-Raids work.

Besides using the Silversata on a studio shoot, I thing it would be a great way to offload P2 cards if you had a power inverter and a big battery. Although I feel confident in the safety of P2, what happens to the data once it's off the cards worries me.
Thanks for the link to the other thread. I have not had time to look at it yet but I will.

Gary,
Look into the Granite Digital firewire cables.
They look extra well protected from interference, have built in ferrite cores and have LED's that tell you when signal is moving. (Dim when its weak as well I think). They cost more but so what.

They have them in 16' and 32'and told me I could experiment with the longer ones and return if they couldn't handle the signal.
I'm really glad you are checking this out as I don't have any jobs on the horizon to warrant the expense for me at the moment, but I am very hopeful about the workflow you are setting up.

This may be a dumb question but I can't find the answer anywhere, what is the exact workflow if you plug the Panny via firewire directly into a G5? If you put the G5 in another room to quiet the noise do you have to go back and manually start stop the capture each time or can you control it via camera?

I suppose you could run a monitor and keyboard/mouse combo into your studio from the control room. (You could use BlueTooth but that could give you troubles.) I'm positive you can't control recording to final cut from the Panny ... nothing to do that with, at least right now. Someone plese correct me if I'm wrong.

The PowerBook route has been my choice and it has worked flawlessly. I've had my PowerBook/Hard Drive in the same room (about 12-15 feet away from the boom) and I haven't had any noticeable bleed.

Leonard,
I checked out the Granite Digital cables and they look interesting. I didn't know you could get firewire to go that long. They have other interesting products as well. I will keep them in mind as a resource. I went with Weibetech as they are fairly well known within the Mac community, especially after they came out with the G5 Jam. I lusted after the Jam setups until I found the external FirmTek units.

Leonard, I read a little more on the Granite Digital cables and I am going to call them Monday and order a 16 foot cable.