Is this RAID a really good deal or is it just me?

[Cory Sheldon]

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other.../MESR7M10TB32/

This seems to be really inexpensive, am I missing something here? Is the only thing I'd need to get to get RAID 0 going is a eSATA card.

Speaking of, anyone know of a card that could work with this, I have a Powermac G5 dual 2.33, I'm a bit new to purchasing RAID/esata stuff

[Robert Lane]

Cory,

This drive is designed for storage, not HD-compliant editing. The E-SATA bus is *theoretically* faster than using FW or USB2 but in real-world usage it's not that much better. Since this enclosure lets you either setup RAID 0 or 1 you could get a performance boost by striping allowing faster read/writes of files but in an edit scenario tied to an NLE any e-SATA drive setup will slow down considerably because no e-SATA configuration has any external controller cache to offload drive cache when it becomes full - which happens very quickly during editing.

In a thread many moons ago I posted a long technical comparison between e-SATA, SCSI and Fiber arrays and the limitations/cost comparisons of each.

If you want this drive for fast access to content or archive purposes it's a great solution but don't expect this to give you multiple streams of real-time playback capability, that's not what it was designed for.