Re: Fibre Channel Setup Debauchery

(ME): We are very aware of this. In this hypothetical context, the G5 would be acting as the link between the eSATA RAID arrays and the Mac Pro. All the video processing would be done on the Mac Pro, so in retrospect, I wasn't worried about the capabilities of the G5 to process video. Even if PCI-X is comparatively slower than PCIe, does it really make that huge a different if all it's doing is transferring information from one or two eSATA RAIDS by way of one or two 4-port PCI-X cards to the ATTO card and then to the Mac Pro? I guess my assumption is that a lot of processor work is being done on the HBA and eSATA cards, and that PCI-X is fast enough to accommodate 10-bit uncompressed and upwards.

Or am I wrong, horribly, wrong?


Here's what you should really do, I think you are over doing your question.

(that's not meant as a mean thing......just think about this for one second...)

Put the Mac Pro as the Server, Use the G5 with VPN, Final Cut (or whatever application) Put your storage behind the Mac Pro, and configure it for sharing across the network.

(as long as your application runs over a network, you can have it connect to things across the network...makes sense)

Connect Ethernet from G5 to Mac Pro and Share the storage from the server with the Mac Pro doing all the work, Server, Storage Server, Client, VPN, etc (Apple makes very good hardware as we all know...)

Find out if you can make that work with what you want to do. It might require you to continue further testing to see what kind of results you can achieve.

You are doing a couple of things by changing the G5 and the Mac Pro around.

1) Mac Pro has PCI Express...
2) Mac Pro has faster architecture then the G5 (and is also Intel based..)
3) It has better CPU's for more Server activity...
4) It either has it now, or should have more memory then the G5 does now....



Let me know ..



About the Fiber Channel related questions, I'm not an expert there....plenty of others here are however. I'll defer to anyone else that has more knowledge on that type of conversation..

Matt G.