Paul Moog and other G5'vers looking for speed
 

Hey, over at www.barefeats.com I saw some stuff about the G5 speed problem with FW800 drives. Apparently, it's solved for cheap...

http://www.it-enquirer.com/index.php..._power_mac_g5/

What do you guys think of that? Who's got a FW800 card and some of those huge Lacie drives to check this out???

Murph

Gary Adcock's Firewire Video Suggestions
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Christopher C. Murphy : speed problem with FW800 drives.

Who's got a FW800 card and some of those huge Lacie drives to check this out??? -->>>

Gary Adcock presented an excellent HD demo at the FCPUG Network meeting at Macworld San Francisco last January. He used an Apple G4 Powerbook with two FW800 external 500GB Lacie drives in a Raid configuration. It worked beautifully.

Gary also has an article "FireWire Storage and You" on page 42 in the July 2004 issue of Videography Magazine. A pdf can be downloaded from:

http://www.uemedia.net/CPC/videograp.../0704Vidv6.pdf

Maury, I can't seem to get that link to work!

Any way you can email it to me? It looks like a PDF?

Thanks!

Murph

Thank you for posting this. I've actually been doing this for a long time with firewire 400 drives on my old machine. Always if you create a second firewire bus by adding a firewire card, then raiding two drives together that are connected separately, one to each bus (internal 800 bus and card 800 bus) you get a huge speed bump. It's still not as fast as SATA raid arrays though.

Thanks

Paul

Just wondering, but I have two Maxtor 5000DV 200gig firewire drives. I'm just running them straight with no RAID or anything.

My question is - should I buy a firewire 800 card for my G5 and run them through that? It's strange, I must be losing it...but, I thought that Firewire 800 was included on the G5 dual 2.0's? I poured over the specs, and sure enough I can't find anything about it. I must have read that wrong a long time ago.

Still wondering what to do about RAID. I've got $400 to spend, but I already have 400 gigs of firewire sitting here. Stinks that I can't RAID firewire 400 drives.

Murph

Hi Chris,
Yes there is one firewire 800 port that comes standard on the G5 dual 2ghz, and two firewire 400 ports. You can do a software RAID with either the 400 or 800 ports. The point is that you need to create a separate, new firewire buss in the computer, using an additional PCI firewire interface card, in order to get the extra speed out of a firewire RAID.

Paul

Hey Paul, I just looked up the spec sheet and I get it now. I've been plugging my FW 400 drives into the 400, and without realizing it I've recently plugged in an "iSight" into the 800 port.

Thanks for the help!

Murph