Firewire 800 LaCie Big Disk thoughts?

jkrepner wrote on 10/28/2004, 7:54 AM
Has anyone tethered one of these 500GB suckers to their editing machines, specifically via firewire 800? I'd buy a Firewire 800 card to connect the drive, and use a separate firewire card for capture and editing. This thing retails at CompUSA for $449.
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=316229&pfp=BROWSE

Speaking of Moore's Law:
I could get 3 Terabytes of external storage, fast enough to edit on, for under $3,000. About 7 years ago I spent that much to get an external SCSI array. What a bargain? 7 years ago, $3,000 bought me... 36GB TOTAL!!!!



Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 10/28/2004, 8:20 AM
Yes, I've tethered the 400 gig version to a computer just last week. The television station I was training at decided to go FW800. I installed a second FW card just for it, as the original card is only FW400. So, they've got 2 cards.
Sucker flies. I've only used one though, haven't stacked them. Can't comment on that aspect.
jkrepner wrote on 10/28/2004, 8:39 AM
mmm? Stacking as in RAID 0/1? I was just about to do some "house cleaning" (i.e. archive old projects), when I saw this unit.

Thanks for the input from the field.
Spot|DSE wrote on 10/28/2004, 8:55 AM
Stacking as in chaining. I'd not do a separate unit FW raid. In otherwords, if you want an FW raid, I'd get one box that has RAID controllers in it, not attempt it with stacking drives. Too easy for a cable to be knocked about.
jkrepner wrote on 10/28/2004, 11:32 AM
Right. Firewire is sort of designed for easy plug/unplug of the cables. Not exactly a characteristic one would prefer when writing data across multiple drives.
John_Cline wrote on 10/28/2004, 1:36 PM
I suspect the the LaCie drive is actually two, striped 250 gig drives.

John
Spot|DSE wrote on 10/28/2004, 4:11 PM
The 500 gig model is. The 400 gig model is an actual drive, but I don't know who makes it. Drive case is the same size, actually smaller, than the new ADS units.
John_Cline wrote on 10/28/2004, 6:34 PM
Only Hitachi is making a 400 gig drive. It's a great drive, too.

John
Bill Ravens wrote on 10/29/2004, 8:11 AM
Just a note to anyone considering firewire 800. All the add-in PCI cards that add firewire 800 to a PC have to plug in to a PCI64 slot, otherwise they only provide 400mb/s. If anyone has found otherwise, I'd love to hear because only server mobos currently support PCI64 type slots.
musman wrote on 10/29/2004, 11:54 AM
Interesting, I hadn't heard that. Bummer. I guess this means the big Disk and the G Raid are 400 speed only options for most of us then.
jkrepner wrote on 10/29/2004, 12:51 PM
Bill, I checked Lacie's site - they sell a firewire 800 card, and it appears to be a plain old PCI card. It makes no mention of PCI64.

So I think firewire 800 cards DO work in anyone's PCI slot.

Bill Ravens wrote on 10/29/2004, 12:58 PM
I rather doubt it. PCI32, which is the standard motherboard PCI spec, doesn't have the thruput to handle 800 Mb/sec. I would caution that you contact Lacie for clarification. For some reason, all the Firewire 400/800 manufacturers are very elusive in answering this question. I've written to them on several occasions with the question and they all declined to respond. It's pretty evident from looking at the PCI32 spec that it can't handle higher thruput.

The newest Intel 925 mobo chip has PCI Express and 1394b built in. That's because PCI Express is a higher thruput that PCI32. In fact, here's a quote from one manufacturer "1394b FireWire 800 PCI cards will work in either 32 or 64 bit PCI slots. 1394b is designed for full performance in a 64 bit slot. The card will function in a 32 bit slot but not the same performance as in a 64 bit slot. When acting as a PCI bus master, the device is capable of multiple cacheline bursts of data, which can transfer at 264M bytes/s for 64-bit slot transfers or 132M bytes/s for 32-bit slot transfers."

As I said, earlier, if anyone can conclusively prove me wrong, I'd be thrilled to hear it.
jkrepner wrote on 10/29/2004, 1:39 PM
Thanks Bill.

The LaCie Firewire 800 PCI Card instruction manual states as a minimum hardware requirement, "PCI Slot that complies with PCI Rev. 2.0 or above."

I did a brief search and I didn't uncover anything that gave details as to which PCI Rev means what. Does anyone have knowledge on PCI Rev #'s and it's thruput specs?