[Ti] Tiny Road RAID?

[Kynan Shook]

That would be pushing the FireWire power limits on a PowerBook to the 
limits...  Looking at the Toshiba 6022GAX 60 GB drive for an example, 
the peak power (when spinning up) gets to 5 W.  After that, it peaks at 
2.9 W while seeking.  The maximum power available on FireWire from the 
PowerBook is 7 W; I think you can get about 15 W from the desktops.  In 
other words, you couldn't plug them both in at the same time, which 
you'd probably have to do for the RAID to work properly.  If it would 
work to plug them in separately, that would only leave .6 W for each 
IDE-to-FireWire bridge (7W minus 2.9 W*2=1.2 W total), which isn't 
much, but I have no clue how much power those things use.
I always have a bus-powered IBM hard drive hooked up to my computer, 
and I sometimes have my iPod connected too, and this works just fine.  
However, the IBM drive uses 4.5 W max, and the iPod's hard drive (where 
most of the power drain is from) uses about 1.3 W max, and since I 
connect them at different times, they're never both using that much 
power at the same time; most of the time the total power draw would be 
only 3-4 W between the two of them.

A couple years back, VST made a FireWire RAID that I believe could be 
battery-powered (using a PowerBook G3 battery).  Since SmartDisk bought 
them, I don't think they make this product any more, but you could see 
if anybody is selling one on eBay or something.  But if you go this 
route, you might have to crack open the drive cases to install larger 
hard drives, since I doubt they were made as large as you need.

XXL <xxl at mac.com> writes:
> Anyone tried using 2 small form factor FireWire external drives as a 
> fast
> array for video editing on the road?  Sounds like it it might be worth 
> a try
> to me.
>
> Anybody have 2 small external drives they care to experiment with?
>
> Will the FireWire bus power 2 small drives without an external power 
> supply?


Kynan Shook
kshook at mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/kshook/index.html