What is the difference between all these non-scsi types of storage? I know the Ultra ATA/66 is the basic one that comes with the new G3s. Are the others better or worse or the same. I know scsi is faster, but the ATA/66 is fast enough for DV work. What about the other terminologies?

-- Robert E. Dorn (redeyefilm@yahoo.com), August 02, 1999

Answers

I can't tell you the difference between them, but I can tell you that EIDE works fine for DV. I keep seeing people recommending SCSI drives and saying "Yeah, well sure it's expensive, but you be glad you did." My personal theory is that they already blew their money on SCSI drives and are jealous that you are getting into NLE at the point where EIDE is fine. I have a blue G3 with the TurboMax card from ProMax. It has allowed me to hook up two 16.8 Ultra DMA ATA/33 drives. (not ATA/66) It works beautifully. Never had a problem, even with hour long programs. If you can use EIDE, don't spend twice as much on SCSI. And while you're at it, get the drives from PCMall instead. They sell the same ones for almost 50% less.

-- Xandy Smith (ads220@is8.nyu.edu), August 03, 1999.

I set up systems for the PC and edit as well. I am using a promise Fasttrak 66 IDE raid card with 4 20.4 gig Ultra ATA 66 drives. Striped as RAID 0, I get 35 megs per second sustained transfer rate. that's fast enough for dual stream editing at 15+ megs per second. Since DV is 3.6 megs per second this is way plenty.

I don't about doing that with a Mac, they don't seem to have the openess that PC's have. This might work on it, but I don't know. Windows 95/98 can't do this either, only windows NT.

If anyone needs a high quality DV system, 3rd Coast Multimedia offers them at very reasonable rates. Check out www.3cm.net.

-- Thomas Koch (TomK@3cm.net), August 03, 1999.

The remark about "blowing their money on SCSI"'s was, well, stupid. The short answer on your drive needs is that it depends.

Are you working with a firewire card and doing native DV editing? If so, not much speed is required, and you can start enjoying the savings of non-scsi options.

BUT say you need a professional system with real-time effects that handles a variety of video formats... like a Matrox Digisuite system for example... then not only do you need SCSI drives, but you're going to need them in striped sets of 3-4 drives each.

You can start entering into the zen of performance benchmarking and find yourself memorizing sustained throughput rates of different drive makes and control formats. Then again, you can just first decide on the video hardware you're going with and call their tech support to see what they recommend--quick, dirty, and probably your best information.

-- John Windmueller (jwind@cais.com), August 13, 1999.