Jeff's recent comments on the FWB Jackhammer brought back a lot of memories. For those who have no interest in RAIDs and how Radius' efforts led directly to the SuperMac RAID-based systems, skip this whole post.
I started playing with RAIDs at Radius when the company was selling the "StudioArray" to complement VideoVision Studio workstations. These were often paired with the Radius System 100, the Mac clone that was the first to be designed and built by the team that would spin off from Radius and become Umax Computer Corporation less than a year later. (Radius was spinning off everything at the time -- flying to pieces, some have said.) The 8GB StudioArray was based on either the NuBus FWB Jackhammer or ATTO SiliconExpress IV cards, and involved two 4GB Quantum 16-bit Fast & Wide SCSI drives, striped in 64K increments. Performance was phenominal at the time. Remember, this was back when virutally all "digital" video production work involved coming in from -- and going back out to -- the analog realm. MB/sec throughput was everything, as Motion-JPEG had to apply what was originally conceived as a still image compression scheme on the fly at 30 frames/sec. The higher your throughput, the better your video quality -- visibly. I personally preferred working in the 4.0 - 5.0MB/sec range, and couldn't tolerate anything below 3.6MB/sec. When the Systems group left Radius to bring the S900 to market for Umax, they brought with them the RAID appreciation and knowledge they had picked up from the Digital Video group. The S900 was originally going to be the fourth design from Radius, purpose-built for serious digital video work (the third design, a PowerPC 601, NuBus-based victim of bad timing, never saw mass production). The Extended Performance PCI slot which houses the E100 (derived from the PCI Jackhammer) was intended specifically for this purpose; adding 10/100BaseT Ethernet to the card was a semi-good Marketing move to boost its appeal as an add-on. The additional connector on the end of the PCI slot doesn't let either function work faster; it just lets both work without interfering with each other. All of this eventually culminated in the SuperMac S900 DP/250 RAID model, a high price, low quantity, E100-installed, 4GB RAID-bootable configuration which was the best out-of-the box digital video platform available in early 1998. I've used both the E100 and the Adaptec 2940UW in S900s to great results. RAID software included FWB's RAID Toolkit and SoftRaid 2. SoftRaid 2 got me the farthest and will remain in use on my S900 for a while longer as that now becomes my brother-in-law's main system. RAIDs are still cool, but far less essential for comparable work being done today. The DV codec with FireWire as the transport only swallows about 3.6MB/sec, which is why even lowly iBooks can do acceptable video work. RAIDs' most critical application today is in Storage Area Networks (SANs) in the terabyte (and even petabyte) range, where speed is expected but mass is the real goal. SCSI is the only way to go (blame FibreChannel), and I've personally never tried striping IDE drives into a RAID. The two-device-per-bus setup is a bit limiting, and IDE requires a lot more direct management on the part of the processor; SCSI devices can do a lot more on their own. I'm sure there are single SCSI drives out there that surpass the best an IDE-based RAID will ever do. Okay, I'm all out of history for now. -Kennedy -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
