Best Hard Drive Configuration?

[goodrichm]

What's the best VT hard drive configuration?

From what I understand I need at least 5 physical hard drives:

1 Video striped set with minimum 3 physical drives
1 Audio physical drive
1 System physical drive

If so, my Dell Precision 420 workstation (Adaptec AIC 7899 Ultra 160 SCSI Controller) will only hold 4 physical drives.

Does anyone know of a decent external SCSI hard drive box to house additional drives that's not a RAID nor requires an additional SCSI Controller?

What are the best bang-for-buck SCSI drives for a VT system? I've heard some good comments about Seagate SCSI 320 drives.

Thanx...Mark

[Tom Wood]

Hi Mark,

I just went through a similar analysis. I bought a BOXX system and would recommend that you go with a turnkey system from a dealer that is in partnership with Newtek. The 3DBOXX S5s houses up to 4 U320 SCSI drives. (I guess you could use an IDE drive for the system, but I went with a SCSI because the DVEs reside on the system drive, and because it seems like a simpler configuration. There is no need for a controller card, XP Pro and the onboard E7505MB controller does it for you.) BTW, I really have little clue what I am talking about, but if you go turnkey, it all seems to make sense.

So, I have one 73GB SCSI sytem drive with ~70MB/second, and a RAID of three 73GB SCSI drives with about 177MB/second. I was going to put the audio on the RAID array, but we are still working out the hardware interaction between a high end audio card (www.digitalaudio.com) and the VT card. The guys at BOXX seem to think the new VT3 code will solve an apparent conflict.

TW

[sywitt]

We've been getting away without a separate audio drive. We put it on our video stripe set. No problemo...

[wvp]

The "best" hard drive config depends on your budget and recording needs.
U320 SCSI drives will give you the best performance. Look in the hardware section here for specific reccomendations for drives. Three drives would work, 4 would be even better (all striped together).
It may not be pretty, but you could mount these in an external housing or an old computer & run the SCSI cable to the connection inside the Dell.
An alternative would be a Medea array - these come in external housings ready to go.
You do not need to put the audio on a seperate drive. It can be stored in the same folders as your video.