FCP editing using external SATA drive & SATA PCMCIA card

Does any one currently edit FCP using an external SATA drive & SATA PMCIA card? If so, what are the pros/cons? Are there any issues I need to be aware of?

I've been working on a project for the past year in such a scenario. No different than using the internal drive.

Except that the power supply on the external tower blew, and cost me $0 to replace on warranty. (I did pay an advance fee of $65 which they refunded me when they (MacGurus.com) received the old PS back from me a few days after i swapped it.).

I have a G5 (non-Intel), current OSX and current FCP.

PCMCIA has a data rate ceiling of 65 to 70 MB/s. So even though the drives are rated for 140MB/s, the best throughput you could get via PCMCIA is 65MB/s. PCIExpress ups it to 100MB/s, but that still isn't good enough for uncompressed HD. Uncompressed SD only, and up to DVCPRO HD.

BUT...it frees up ALL your firewire ports so you can connect cameras and decks.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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Shane -
[PCIExpress ups it to 100MB/s, but that still isn't good enough for uncompressed HD. Uncompressed SD only, and up to DVCPRO HD. ]

It begs the question, if I stripe two or more eSatas for higher bandwidth, am I limited to 100 MB/s even if both are hooked up to separate ports on the same card? Different cards?

- Loren
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willrho Wrote:
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> Does any one currently edit FCP using an external
> SATA drive & SATA PMCIA card? If so, what are the
> pros/cons?

I have that exact setup of a PB G4 1.5Ghz with a SATA PCMCIA card with 2 external SATA drives hooked up. I got the card from wiebetech.com.

It is great for the reason that Shane has already outlined. It frees up the Firewire ports. This benefit cannot be understated on a powerbook if you are editing video.

I have a really wierd bug with the card and I am not sure if it my particular card or a general issue iwth it. I cannot copy from one SATA drive to the other SATA drive. The machine locks up solid as a rock. I phoned the service tech and he didn't know of that problem with the card. Because of the 65 megabyte bottleneck I gave up on the idea of using it as a tiny RAID and I benefit so much from the card that I cannot part with it for a few weeks while I get a replacement card from wiebetech to find out if it is a general problem or a specific one to my card.

There is another SATA PCMCIA card out now that does port multiplication now. What that means is you can take a port mutliplied SATA box of say 4 hardrives and run it off one SATA port from the port multiplier aware card. Still you cannot do a useful RAID from it because of the data bottleneck but you can have insane amounts of storage at your finger tips for cheap, cheap.

If you are interested in the port multiplier route, post up and I will provide more info and links.

-Andrew

Thanks everyone for all the helpful feedback. Very useful.

Andrew,
I am interested in the the port multiplier. Please provide links.

I got mine from [www.MacGurus.com]

Tower, 4 SATA drives, 4 SATA cables, 4 port (port multiplier) SATA PCI card for G5 PPC.

Power supply went bad after 6 months, and they swapped it.

They are attentive to e-mail!

OT - They pronounce SATA with a short 'a' (SAT-ah) where I pronounce SATA with a long 'A' (SAY-tah). But it is darn good stuff that really works.

So the portmultipling PCMCIA SATA card is located on [ this ] page. You will see it towards the bottom of the page -- second from the bottom.

If you want to get a cheap and nasty RAID setup or a box to run a set of unRAIDed disks, commoned referred to as a JBOD (Just a bunch of disks) setup, you should jones around the AMUG reviews section. It's a bit overwhelming at first due to all the technical info but they are really into finding out what the most affordable but good RAID setup is at any given point in time. If you are looking for a shortcut to all of their info, I would steer you towards the Sonnet Fusion 500P box if you want to run a bunch of hardrives or a RAID 0 or 1.

If you want to jump to a cheap RAID that will run RAID 5 on a Mac Pro tower and not break the bank account you can. There are again a few solutions outlined in the [ reviews section ] of the AMUG site.

Please remember the caveat from earlier in this thread. Running a RAID off a powerbook is effectively pointless as the bus speed of PCMCIA prevents you from taking advantage of a RAIDs throughput.

My deepest wish right now is that Apple will release a new MacBook Pro with 2 port multiplied SATA ports on it and the ability to run 2 huge external monitors. This way you could (if you wanted) edit real HD on a Mac laptop (albeit slowly).

If you get the port multiplied SATA from wiebetech let me know your experience with it.

-Andrew Stone