p2 hardware analysis

C

cyphunk

Member
With large memory drives getting applied to more devices (mediaplayers, pcs, p2, etc) im getting curious about . There is the Hoodman P2 clones and the other applications of external disks that use the P2 slot. Today I saw another ExpressCard style 32GB card (by Transcend) that one can use in a laptop. It is sold for $508. And now I'm curious, what exactly differentiates the P2 hardware from this, other than PCMCIA vs ExpressCard? While memory based drive technology is going to move rapidly I'm sure Panasonic will attempt to keep up and within price range. However, the hardware geek in me wants to pull one apart and start to analyze, even if its a lot of work only to save a few bucks or gain a few gig (it's never about that anyway).

So what is the difference between the Hoodman P2, the Panasonic P2 and the Transcend 32GB?
 
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I think the Hoodman P2 is a Panasonic P2 reverse engineered. The P2 technology has built in proprietary raid software that allows faster transfer rates than just writing to one large SD card through a PCMCIA bus.
 
p2 LSI custom or 3rd party?

p2 LSI custom or 3rd party?

brokenjack said:
I think the Hoodman P2 is a Panasonic P2 reverse engineered. The P2 technology has built in proprietary raid software that allows faster transfer rates than just writing to one large SD card through a PCMCIA bus.
Click to expand...

Thanks. The wikipedia article mentiones that it also has its own LSI/chip (link). Does anyone know if this is a custom chip or 3rd party?

At the moment, if I were to open it up I assume I would see a bunch of memory chips, the raid controller chip and some other ic to manage the bus (pcmcia) and the raid. Has anyone looked inside? know of other chips laying around?
 
A summary of questions:

1) Does anyone know if the LSI is a custom chip or 3rd party?
2) Anyone know other chips in there, other than the RAID controler, LSI, and memory?
3) What are the min speeds needed for 720/24p, and further 1080?

concerning #3:
via this thread: "On Panasonic's web site, they list the data rate of the 4 GB card as 640Mbps" -- Sasha Aicki. "That equals roughly 80 MB/S. That type of speed is usually only reachable on hard drives at a sustained rate on a raid 0 setup of 2 or more drives. Even a 2 drive setup may have trouble getting to that level of a sustained transfer rate. For example the G-raid external raid gets a sustained write rate of around 50 to 60 MB/S with using 2 drives. In order to get a 80 MB/S copy rate from P2 you would almost need a raid-0 with 4 drives" -- Thomas Smet

But supposedly 640Mbps is over 6 times real time speed of 1080. Hence:

4) ignoring read time and just worring about real time writing, does one still need the RAID to write 1080 realtime?
 
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Nobody outside of Panasonic (other than Spec-Comm) knows exactly what's inside a P2 card. As I understand it, the card is its own microcomputer. There was a post here by Spec-Comm that said the card was far more complex than they ever imagined when they began the CinePorter project, and that the card needs to be able to receive and respond to something like 42 different commands that can be issued by a P2-compatible device.
 
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