[MacDV] Re: Any advantages to RAID for DV?

[Richard Brown]

I am currently testing a RAID Level 0 array with two Western Digital 
200GB drives, which, on my G4, works out to an extremely high 
performance 372GB array which reads at 65MB/sec and writes at 45MB/sec 
consistently. This is far above single drive performance, and far above 
the needs of DV. The WD drives will be replaced by the new Maxtor 
Maxline drives when they finally arrive on our shores. Initial results 
on this RAID shows zero dropped frames to date. You should always keep 
the dropped frame detection services alive on FCP just to confirm your 
system is working correctly. Around here, on both desktop G4's and on 
our editing TiBook, we have only dropped frames on playback when the 
timeline was heavy on multitracked audio (8+ channels) with 8 or so 
video tracks. All dropped frames were eliminated by issuing a "Mixdown 
Audio" command (which tames 8 or more audio tracks to 2.)

Richard Brown