Cheapest solution for uncompressed HD playback

[Stephen van Vuuren]

I'm interested in building a solution for uncompressed HD (1080p @ 24fps) playback. I don't need anything but just playback on the desktop (and possibly output via DVI or component).

I've got an aging P4 system with 2-drive SATA RAID zero and trying to figure if I can shoe horn something onboard.

[Keith Wakeham]

Processor isn't such a big deal for uncompressed. (At 960x540 8bit 4:2:2 my centrino 1.6Ghz clocks itself down to 600 Mhz and still only uses half the processor) So I'd say your find their.

What you need is a fast drive setup. Normally it is recommended that 5 Sata high end drives are required for for 720p60 and 1080 30p/60i. Anyway that asside I think it can be done with 4 new drives so long as you don't intend to fill the drives fully. So I'm thinking you'll be safe with 4 drives in the class of a 250GB+ 7200RPM drive that are fairly new.

BUT.......
not if its though the PCI bus! With overhead and controller waste even 1080p24 is a strectch for the pci bus. (pci = 133MB/s, 1080p24 = 124MB/s with good packing).

Their is a way around this I think (I haven't tested it thoughly, and only with Pata, not SATA). Use windows software raid. Most cheap raid cards are software controllers anyway and most NLE and HD-SDI board companies recommend it unless you have a high end hardware raid controller with the ram slot and stuff. (All onboard raid are soft raid)

So here is my solution if you don't have 4 sata ports onboard that connect directly to your chipset. Have some drives connect directly on board to the chipset controller and run some to a pci controller. Use windows drive management to setup a 4 or more drive raid 0 setup.

Keep in mind that some Pata version of new drives that are available as sata are actually faster than their sata counterparts (by <1%) and normally not much slower. So if you don't have sata, you can certainly use new Pata drives as well for this.

[Stephen van Vuuren]

Originally Posted by Keith Wakeham

So here is my solution if you don't have 4 sata ports onboard that connect directly to your chipset. Have some drives connect directly on board to the chipset controller and run some to a pci controller. Use windows drive management to setup a 4 or more drive raid 0 setup.

Thanks for the info. That's very helpful. I've got 2 250 GB off chipset and nothing on the PCI bus right now, so that might work.

[Keith Wakeham]

I hope it does work. I'd be very interested to hear about it when you try and get it up and running.

The PCI bus is a real pain the in throughput area. You might be able to do it all on a half decent raid controller on the PCI bus first, but I'd think it would be pushing it. Still think best changes are PCI with the chipset.

Good luck!