Hi,

Not much to add, Rob has said it all!

Just a quick note on hardware RAID 5. I'm currently using a PCI card: Promise S150 SX4 SATA. It is a 4 channel raid card with hardware XOR machine + you can have up to 256mb of memory onboard. This card costs about 1800:- SEK ( should be about £150 or 260$ ). You can start with 3 drives and then expand the array later. It also support RAID 0,1,10 etc - lots of bang for the buck.

Since you're having all this trouble with an _external_ drive, I belive in on of these explanations:

1. Bad/wrong chipset drivers for your motherboard
2. No FAN inside enclosure
3. Faulty drive

HD Tach reporting zero after a while indicates causes 3 or 1.

Good luck!

// Lazze \\

ps. Rob, do you have a extra speedy keyboard? You write so looong posts :-) ds.

I have to agree with Lazze, ehrm, yeah, okay <g>

Dunno 'bout the keyboard, it came with my Dell laptop, eheh. But
I can pretty much type blind, so that should help!

Nobody here has mentioned firewire 800 hard drives and controllers.
The contoller cards go for around $69, and the firewire 800 drives are coming as large as 400-500 gigs, at a little less than a dollar a gig.

I've been looking at them for some time now, and the throughput seems to be more than fast enough for DV editing.
Have people had problems with these?

Thanks,

Jeff P

The reason I didn't mention those (they go to 400 - 500 gig by
using two drives in a raid 0 setup [striping]) was that John was
looking for more security (ie raid 1 or 5) which is very hard to do
with an external setup. But thanks for pointing those out!