[geeks] Disk to Disk Caching

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 11:14 -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

> > Now, VC-1 can go up to 135Mbit/sec, which is nearly 17Mbit/sec, but even
> > two streams of that should easily be within the realm of doable for a
> > FW800 array (provided that it wasn't built using 7 year old disks).
> 
> Does it matter that the FW800 card is sitting in a 32-bit 33MHz PCI 
> slot?  If so, I might invest in a PCIe x1 FW800 card.

A 32bit 33MHz PCI slot is good for over 100MB/sec in theory, and
certainly good for 80MB/sec in practice, unless you have bus contention
with other PCI cards.

> > Have you tried benching the transfer speed of the array to look for
> > malfunction there?
> 
> No.  That's a good idea.  I'll try that.  I have been noticing a very 
> high CPU usage whenever I'm pushing data as fast as possible onto it. 
> Maybe my FW800 drivers suck.  If this is indeed the problem, are there 
> any FW800 for 64-bit Windows you might recommend?

I don't have any specific recommendations towards what is a good FW800
card.  I like the idea of going with Sonnet or else finding out what
FW800 chipset Apple uses and buying a card that uses that chipset.  In
either case, I don't know anything about what cards would have the best
XP64 drivers.

People do certainly use FW800 successfully for multi-stream HDV editing.