Help with hard drive options

D

DVX100percent

Active member
I'm trying to price an avid Xpress pro system (with Mojo) for the company I work for. It would be based on Macintosh G5 platform. Here are my questions:

What are my options in terms of hard drives. I would like to be able to reliably digitize at highest resolution. I would rather not go with SCSI as they are pricey. I was thinking of either firewire or SATA(if that's even a possibility). Anybody knows of a good solution (from personal experiance)?

What is the highest resolution for Xpress Pro? Since link between MOJO and Mac is Firewire, is it DV quality. Or is it better? What is the data rate?

Any other suggestions or warnings would be appreciated.

Vlad
 
Re: Help with hard drive options

You have three resolutions to work with when using XPress Pro and a Mojo in a 30i project type: 1:1 uncompressed (via component analog), DV25 and an offline resolution. In 24 frame projects you cac capture as DV25 or 28:1 offline.

You can do a single stream of 1:1 with Xpress and Mojo, but doing that off of a FireWire drive will not be the most reliable. Usually a SCSI disk for performance purposes. FireWire drive is great for DV25 resolution. Make sure that your externa drives and the Mojo are on different FireWire buses or the Mojo will not work.

Michael
 
Re: Help with hard drive options

I didn't know Mojo supports component inputs - that's great. Do you know by any chance what the rate is for uncompressed? I would rather have a reliable system, so, I guess SCSI is the way to go. Anybody have any suggestions for SCSI cards/drives and vendors?
 
Re: Help with hard drive options

If I remember correctly, uncompressed NTSC is around 160Mb/s. A minimum sustain rate of 7200RPM is needed. Many FireWire drives have this rate but it is pretty borderline for longer programs.

Make sure you order the component cable with your Mojo as well as a RS-422 9 pin deck control cable. Doesn't the G5 have SCSI native on the motherboard?

I use an HP 8200 and I have diual SCSI native so I stripe two SCSI drives across them for even more bandwidth performance.
 
Re: Help with hard drive options

G3 was the last generation of macs to have native SCSI. Apple has been trying to abandon this technology for years. I guess they haven't been quite successful.

I see some firewire disk arrays on the market such as the ones from Medea. I'm wondering if anybody had independently tested them to see how much faster they really are then single discs?
 
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