Opinion on 1 tb internal in new G5

My place of employment has just purchased the last available G5 in the UKwith 2 x 2.7 ghz processors with a 1 Tb internal hard drive. It has a speed of 100mb per sec and hold more than a Lacie Extreme firewire 800...so I'm told. This is a better option than external firewire is it not when using digi beta?

This sounds like they are offering two 500 GB internal SATA drives. There are two internal drive load slots inside the G5. Both can be connected with 1.5 GB/sec SATA connections.

The boot drive and the second drive can not be RAID'ed to be used successfully as a capture drive for SD.

This is pure speculation, on my part, in answering this as not knowing what other drive solutions they may be offering internally.

I do agree that SATA RAID is better than Firewire and almost anything is beter than a LaCie solution.

> "almost anything is better than a LaCie solution"

A bit of an oxymoron, there..."Lacie Solution". Usually it's a Lacie Problem. That said, when our SATA RAID began acting up, it was a Lacie drive lying around that permitted us to continue to work. But I've told my bosses to look for another brand -- that Lacie makes enough noise to wake the dead. Not optimistic.

Internal SATA is better that firewire...without a doubt.

But yes, what john said is true, you cannot use the system drive for capturing material, so you cannot count the first 500 GB drive. You can archive onto it, or store music and pictures there, but not media.

There is a way to use that extra drive - plus 3 more in a 4 - drive SATA RAID INTERNALLY in a G5:

SwiftData200

[www.transintl.com]

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

10/24/05

Hang on, Shane,

I know that I shouldn't do it in theory, but I've had no problems at all in capturing SD to my internal SATA system drive.

I guess I must be a particularly wonderful person or something.

Harry.

Harry Bromley-Davenport

<<<>but I've had no problems at all in capturing SD to my internal SATA system drive. >>>

I have no doubt you are a totally wonderful person and you happen to be right. We capture and play with the System Drive all the time with no problems (most of the time by accident, but still.)

That is a total old wive's tale that keeps being dredged up as The Way It Is. It's not. Apple is competely silent about this unlike using FireWire drives, about which they don't think too highly and can become unstable.

That said, you still can't vilolate any of the other rules; no drive over 90% full, no fair downloading porn while you're trying to capture, etc. etc.

Koz

By the way, in a glancing blow to the original question. Most people go to a T-Byte storage system and dance around the room in pure joy--until they realize there's no way to back all that stuff up in case of faiure.

With a T-Byte of storage, I figure between six months and a years worh of valuable clips, projects, and timelines in the toilet when that drive does down.

Koz

Excellent point, Koz. Bottom line is, nothing -- no technology, no gadget, no mythically talented personnel -- can replace the all-important manual backup. It's not the equipment's fault; we simply have to temper our work habits to ensure our own safety. Unless any of us thinks it's fun to try to recut 28 episodes of a 22-minute show about hair and makeup.

<<<Unless any of us thinks it's fun to try to recut 28 episodes of a 22-minute show about hair and makeup.>>>

Are we speaking from personal experience?


Our particular wake-up call was many, many uncompressed commercial captures which waved goodby one day. The drive didn't fail dead, it failed very slow, so we were able to download all the work by mounting the drive in a lesser-used machine along with a large FireWire drive and just let it chug. ..for days.

Our latest setups feature 1T LaCie external stacks. We are set up as RAID 5 which gives crash safety, but only allows us to use 75% of the stack, which is fine by us. We also have a lot of material duplicated between two machines.

I want to actually tear one drive out of the stack to see how it works. Nothing like finding a mechanical problem on Friday just before FedEx.

I have a fine collection of scars.

Koz

>> Unless any of us thinks it's fun to try to recut 28 episodes of a 22-minute
>> show about hair and makeup.
> Are we speaking from personal experience?

Not quite, but you could say. One episode of such a series. The bosses picked up the Lacie drive containing the final approved cut of the show, then the drive died while it was in their possession. Luckily I had the project file backed up on a USB stick, so all we lost were graphics (which were created from the show template, anyway, so it's just a typing job, not a redesign). Probably would've been a $700 job if I hadn't done that.

They were asking for trouble from the beginning, anyway, since the brands of drives they used were mostly Maxtors, Lacies, and 120GB Red Orb drives that weren't even big enough to hold a whole show.

I considered internal SATA raid options and decided to go with the external for two reasons. 1.) heat 2.) Didn't want to overburdeon the G5 powersupply. As for backup, most of the footage lives on tape, assuming that it was properly imported the downside is sitting around for a few hours shoving tapes into a machine. ALWAYS backup your project, motion (or livetype, photoshop, etc.) graphics. CD's and DVD's are cheap insurance.

Joe Brown