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Hell, there's room for both spot and BB - no difference to this kid as I don't give a rats ass about their past media output. It's the content of replies ON FORUMS that holds more interest to me.
I've seen some great responses from both Spot and BillyBoy, and a few handful of others (sorry I forgot your handles - but you are most definitely included). So whether they bicker on a few items is moot - they both are providing some great advice - LISTEN TO THEM BOTH. I doubt either is losing much sleep over any disagreements that happen between them.

I prefer to read spot (and billys and handful of others) posts on the forums. The books from spot aren't of much interest TO ME as all these things can be found for free on the web (here, within the app, DV boards, etc..ad nauseum). So it ain't the fact that a person craps a book or more out that impresses me...it's when they speak directly in a timely fashion on a question\person (for example here) where it's most applicable. And the bickering\disagreements between the two mentioned here help solidify VALID points on either side of the issue at hand. So I say, there's room for bickering and the rest of you can\should stay out if all your doing is playing defense and offering nothing more.

Meat of the matter:

The ram issue isn't really the most interesting, i think you're missing a better (albeit hidden) reccomendation. Check out the I\O in most spots system\room list here - this is where you'll be seeing "consistent" and speedier lanes of opportunity.
I'm also using SCSI (U320 in my case, no RAID btw) drives - AND THERE'S NO WAY IN HELL I'M GOING BACK to strictly IDE. It's hybrid scsi u320\ide for me (until things change).
Yes - it costs more, so before you get your panties in a bunch, I'll also agree it's not for the average user looking to create some dvd's here or there.
For most it's totally valid and reccomended to stay IDE. No need to counter-attack from that angle.

*Note: this isn't the "old scsi" people have bickered and argued about in the past. You must understand how data concurrency factors in to understand why you may want to consider this expensive I\O route. But for working A\V heads out there it's an important addition.

Above average (or even just "average") use: "START" with a stick of 512 - 1 gig ram (really, it's kinda been averaged out to death on any board guys).
But for any serious A\V persons - think further than RAM. Your I\O is a great place to start streamlining after the mobo\proc and ram have been decided - and it's all about CONCURRENCY as well as throughput :)
I've been saying this for quite some time. If time, stability, and performance is of importance, look into a hybridU320 (scsi) I\O along with your system.

** I also suggest use of an OC'd system (intel proc and chipsets mainly).
This requires strict attention to hardware geared for OCing (mobo, proc. ram) which can best apply and answer any skeptics response of "stability worries".
But that info is best left for another post.

jd

The ram issue isn't really the most interesting, i think you're missing a better (albeit hidden) reccomendation. Check out the I\O in most spots system\room list here - this is where you'll be seeing "consistent" and speedier lanes of opportunity.
Nothing 'hidden,' it just didn't seem pertinent. As hdv comes along, and as 4:2:2 HDCAM grows, you'll see more people migrating to dual 160 or 320 SCSI stuff. But it's expensive.
RAIDs are nice, but our 4 RAIDS are all packages from Medea, nothing home-brewed there. It's just too easy to use packages, and doesn't cost that much more. We also have a couple Firewire RAIDs from ADS which are wonderful. For DV.

Most of the rest of your post, I'm in agreement with too, except that out and out lies and racial slurs cannot be tolerated. Like John Cline, I'm inclined to stay over in the DMN and DVinfo.net if Sony will allow this sort of crap to continue. Debate is one thing, and it's healthy. Name calling, ethnic slurring, and personal attacks are another.

What about the new 10,000RPM SATA drives?
SCSI still preferable?

Mario

Leaving "cost" issues aside:
Look further than speed. If we weren't talking about A\V work - i too would suggest any ide or sata. But we are.
If you're more of a gamer, a\v guy, etc...then you probably aren't going to see
the need overall.
Sata isn't a bad option as it would best be compared to be a replacement for "low end scsi" - which we aren't talking about anyway.
Sata can help clean up the guts in a cluttery system (thinner cables).


To borrow some research on the matter:

- "SCSI has a robust tagged command queuing implementation to allow multiple commands to be outstanding which provides significant performance gains for drives or controllers by being able to order the commands in an optimal execution manner. ATA only allows a bus release that is mistakenly called command queuing. The implementation on the class of disk drives that support ATA is different as well".

- scsi hardware overall is built for better longevity. I can also add to concur with this having managed many test labs in my earlier days. This fact seem to still remain the same today. yes, there are those who have had some problem drives, but we're talking "overall".

- cost from 10k scsi to 10k sata isn't too much of a difference
But there is the cntrlr card cost that might factor in for either.

- "The ID system is superior to slave/master relationships and it offers". "more devices per channel (especially good for people who DV work and need to have lots of hard drive space as well as access time)".
SATA: Basically just PATA (or "IDE" if you must), but with more bandwidth, only 1 device per channel (instead of two) and thinner cables.
Typical SATA and ATAPI controllers still don't support command queueing and disconnect, which lessens potential performance in multiple I/O request situations". SATA still uses the CPU's process for operations whereas SCSI offloads this to a dedicated controller

- SCSI uses error correction. To nitpick, transmission errors at high speeds are big problems with true 'parallel' signaling.

Actually it (hybrid scsi-ide I\O - not to mention the benefits of a properly OC'd system) is more pertinent to power users here than ram concerns from what I see. I still see these A\V'rs worrying about ram, yet staunchly disagreeing and overlooking what could be the greater addtition to their system and concerns (hybrid scsi\ide that they would most likely benefit from).
I'm not sure in that last reply if you meant that the I\O wasn't pertinent to "the thread topic" or the overall system advice for serious A\V'rs.
I think it is (so do my past clients).

Thanks for the detailed info.

Mario

"SCSI has a robust tagged command queuing implementation to allow multiple commands to be outstanding which provides significant performance gains for drives or controllers by being able to order the commands in an optimal execution manner" , for multi-tasking this great, but when a single task is rendering, at highest pr., page swapping limited(), the task must "look ahead" for next file req to take max benefit of this feature, but since rendering is a sequence event, and multi tracks are is buffered(from being opened- this is an area of interest), then the issue is completion of the current frame being rendered vs next frame data,.... memory, cpu, disk IO,........ basicly what 'm saying , if you want max rendering, then you need very large disk buffers in memory for file R/W, more you can buffer, especially writes, faster you will render. then the extremely fast CPU speed shows the benefit of SCSI with large memory.

"A Room"
Supermicro X5d MOBO
3.2 Xeon
8 gigs RAM (Holds 12)

I have to say i am very curious about the concept of having 8 gigs of RAM.

If anyone wants to take the time to chack out the Windows XP product information available at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/windows/windowsxp/pro/productinfo/default.aspx , you will see that Windows XP Proefessional Supports "up to 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM ", not 8. The Windows 2000 professional page at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/professional/evaluation/features/default.asp also states that windows 2000 Professional supports "up to 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM ". The only versions of windows that support more than 4 gigs are Windows 2000/2003 Advanced Server (8G) and Datacenter Server (8G).

Having read this, i find it very difficult to believe that anyone has a system with 8G of WORKING RAM: yes it is installed, yes bios recognisies it, but windows cant use it.

IMHO anything over 4G of RAM that does nothing for your system performance, or render speeds (lets face it, if Windows cant use it, what good is it???).

On the other hand, if someone knows of a way to get Windows 2000/XP Professional to work with more than 4G of RAM, i would love to know how!

I just built a Supermicro server with Dual 3.2 Ghz Xeon CPU's and 8 Gigabytes of Ram. It has Windows Server 2003 on it. It recognizes and uses the RAM. It will be serving as our SQL server which gets pounded by users all day long, so that 8 GB of RAM will help bigtime. Anyway, It is possible for a system to use 8 GB of RAM.

I believe that any XP system that has the boot modifier switch enabled can utilize up to either 32 or 64 gig of RAM. I've forgotten which. Earl Foote built our machine for us.

SPOT:
I have tried the Win2K switch in XP pro and it wouldn't boot. Do you remember what the XP switch is?

JJK

I don't. As I mentioned, Earl Foote built the system for us. I'm in Singapore, so somewhat off-time from being able to reach him. I just dropped him a note though, hopefully will hear back from him shortly. It's been a few months, but I do know it was a PITA for a few days.

golli: I was in Iceland about 1973-74 at Keflavik and NARS Site 42 on the other side of the Island. What I remember is the Unions voted up a 17 % pay raise and right after that the government raised taxes 17 %.
I met some very nice people there for my 3 month duration.

JJK