Quad Core PCI Express compatibilty with esata drive enclosures

I am buiding a FCP HD edit system for a documentary recently shot at Angola State Penn.

I want to build my system from the new Quad Core which runs with new PCI Express. Is there a esata drive enclosure system/card/drives totalling 1.5T of space, operating over 300 mbs for $2400 all in? I'm having difficulty coming up with a solve for the Quad.

I've heard of the Rocket card that would work with seritek's 4 bay enclosure, but some tests rate the Rocket poorly overall. Many other manufacturers are in the primlinary stages of creating a card that operates in PCI Express (vs. the current PCI X).

Is there some kind of HD drive system out there spec'd at 1.5T/300mbs for $2400?

Any suggestions of a solution to my situation would be so appreciated as I needed this solve yesterday.

To date the RocketRAID 2320 is the ONLY PCI express card available. My G5 Quad has this card and 4 internal 500 GB Seagate SATA II drives installed as a hardware RAID 0. When I run a benchmark test of the speed it ran to about 230 MB/sec for reads and 200 MB/sec for writes.

The report on barefreats of this runing slow is when set up as a RAID 5.

Highpoint is due out sometime soon with a PCIe version card with 4 internal and one 4 channel external connection. The RocketRaid external 4 drive container is connect by a propriatery bus called the infiniband that has one connection between the card and the external box.

Sonnet is supposed to be shipping PCIe cards this month but they cut back to 4 internal ports on one and 4 external ports on the other, which seems to be a poor choice for their products.

As a RAID 0, the 230 MB/sec is really good because the PCI express 4 lane bus can handle 1 GB of data per second and the bottleneck are the drives from SATA II 3 Gbps max speed.

Hook up 4 internal and 4 external drives and you are up into the 500 MB/sec speeds for the first 2/3rds of the drive.

Actually Sonnet make PCI-Express versions of their 4 port internal or 4 port external Cards now:

Internal SATAII
[www.sonnettech.com]

External SATAII
[www.sonnettech.com]

I use the Tempo-X 8 which has 8 eSATAII channels hooked up to 8x 500GB drives I get about 460MBps.

Ben





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