HD Broadcast Quality Direct to Hard Drive on Dell T7500 Precision Workstation

[Jon Monday]

Late last year I upgraded my cameras and workstation to HD. I bought a Canon XLH1s (the HD upgrade to the XL2) with the HD-SDI port and a XHA1s as my b-roll camera. I was using an AJA Xena (now Kona) LHi video capture card in a Dell T5500 Precision Workstation with 3 1tb drives in a RAID 5 array running Windows XP 64 bit.

When I got all the equipment assembled, it would not capture the full 4:2:2 SDI stream without significant dropped frames - making the whole system unusable. I worked with Dell and AJA, but had no luck. Finally, Dell suggested that I upgrade to a T7500 Precision Workstation, which could hold more disk drives - they recommended a 4 drive, RAID 0 array (which the T5500 could not handle). It also has 12gb RAM, and dual Quad Xeon processors and Windows 7 64bit.

To make a very long story short (too late?), with the addition of 5th drive to use for the OS and a SAS RAID controller card (instead of the mother board), I am able to successfully capture full uncompressed 1920 x 1080 10 bit video. In fact, I captured over 3 hours without a single dropped frame.

Until I got the SAS card, I also had problems with 3rd party eSATA cards - but that has cleared up now.