Is this RAID a really good deal or is it just me? at DVinfo.net

Cory Sheldon · August 16th, 2007, 04:59 PM

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other.../MESR7M10TB32/

This seems to be really inexpensive, am I missing something here? Is the only thing I'd need to get to get RAID 0 going is a eSATA card.

Speaking of, anyone know of a card that could work with this, I have a Powermac G5 dual 2.33, I'm a bit new to purchasing RAID/esata stuff

Robert Lane · August 18th, 2007, 08:30 AM

Cory,

This drive is designed for storage, not HD-compliant editing. The E-SATA bus is *theoretically* faster than using FW or USB2 but in real-world usage it's not that much better. Since this enclosure lets you either setup RAID 0 or 1 you could get a performance boost by striping allowing faster read/writes of files but in an edit scenario tied to an NLE any e-SATA drive setup will slow down considerably because no e-SATA configuration has any external controller cache to offload drive cache when it becomes full - which happens very quickly during editing.

In a thread many moons ago I posted a long technical comparison between e-SATA, SCSI and Fiber arrays and the limitations/cost comparisons of each.

If you want this drive for fast access to content or archive purposes it's a great solution but don't expect this to give you multiple streams of real-time playback capability, that's not what it was designed for.

August 16th, 2007, 04:59 PM	#1
Cory Sheldon Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Cleveland, OH Posts: 33	Is this RAID a really good deal or is it just me? http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other.../MESR7M10TB32/ This seems to be really inexpensive, am I missing something here? Is the only thing I'd need to get to get RAID 0 going is a eSATA card. Speaking of, anyone know of a card that could work with this, I have a Powermac G5 dual 2.33, I'm a bit new to purchasing RAID/esata stuff

August 18th, 2007, 08:30 AM	#2
Robert Lane Go Go Godzilla Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Scottsdale, AZ USA Posts: 2,823 Images: 15	Cory, This drive is designed for storage, not HD-compliant editing. The E-SATA bus is theoretically faster than using FW or USB2 but in real-world usage it's not that much better. Since this enclosure lets you either setup RAID 0 or 1 you could get a performance boost by striping allowing faster read/writes of files but in an edit scenario tied to an NLE any e-SATA drive setup will slow down considerably because no e-SATA configuration has any external controller cache to offload drive cache when it becomes full - which happens very quickly during editing. In a thread many moons ago I posted a long technical comparison between e-SATA, SCSI and Fiber arrays and the limitations/cost comparisons of each. If you want this drive for fast access to content or archive purposes it's a great solution but don't expect this to give you multiple streams of real-time playback capability, that's not what it was designed for.