Re: Firewire RAID and G4- Known ISSUES?

I have to disagree about scsi. It is a very fast, reliable and flexible solution. On an older g4, an ATTO card can be a great addition to any setup. Here is why.

The older ATTO's (UL3s and UL3D) were built for the g4 PCI bus. With an atto you can also control the burst rate of the card. This is important when finding the right combination for a system. When you are building a system there are many things to consider, PCI bandwidth, how much each card is going to take up in each bus.

Many of the new SATA raids are fast but they are not "clockable". What I mean is the card might go in there and take up as much of the PCI bus speed as it can get. This will affect performance by the video card.

The Igniter card was designed for OS9 and ported to OSX. In OS9 I used to be able to move uncompressed video on an internal raid on a Sonnet tempo card. The moment we went to OSX I may as well have tossed the card. It could no longer offer the performance in OSX and I was force to go to SCSI (SATA wasn't around) I found that SCSI has been an effective storage solution. ANyone running a pro set up needs the relaibility and speed and it was well worth the outlay for the confidence it provided me.

I still run that card in OSX on a G5, even though it is slower than it was on a g4 (YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN).

INTERNAL RAIDS; Macs are now liquid cooled right? Think about putting a few extra drives in there, now add an extra PCI card and run motion for twenty minutes. I would not want to tax the heat inside a G5, or a g4 for that matter.

I won't disagree that there are many options, some make more financial sense than other, or at least appear too. But I would look at an ATTO card and G4 benchmarks and consider how much RT you want, etc. and figure out how important speed and reliability means to you.

David