AJA

Here it is. It took me a while to get this post up because...well, I am beat. I spent last weekend finishing the desk...and taking the remaining wood and unused scraps to make THREE bird houses...well, help my daughters make them. Kids demanding their dad's time...how can I refuse? So that was Saturday.

But I am jumping ahead a little. The computer arrived on Thursday, Feb 28...a day ahead of schedule. I jumped for joy at work when my wife called. And when I got home from work...and after a quick meal...I put my full attention onto this machine. Installing three 500 GB Seagates into the spare drives, yanking out the fan to access one of the SATA ports on the logicboard and installing a small drive into the empty optical bay (this I am using as my Time Machine backup). I replaced the stock ATI 2600 card with the x1900 XT card. You heard about that mess last time. OK, bouncing ahead again.

Ok, late news flash as this information is actually from MacWorld (what two months ago now?!?) but the folks at ATTO were able to crank up two MaxxDigital EVO HD SAS/SATA units to 1200MB/s. 1200!!! Good Golly Miss Molly that's some serious horsepower.

Ok, ok, ok, how did they pull this off since you can't connect two systems to the same card? Easy, two ATTO R-380 SAS/SATA cards in a Mac pro. Then connect a MaxxDigital EVO HD unit to each card. Stripe both EVO HD units as one large storage array and presto, 1200MB/s.

Hmmmmm, how many streams of video would THAT be? You could do the Brady Bunch Open times 5 at least I suppose. Would be fun to test that out with Uncompressed HD and see if there's any way to do multiple streams of HD in realtime with filters.

Here's a photo only a mama could love. A bunch of tech geeks standing next to the unit with the speed tests displayed on the screen.

Ongoing discussion at the Apple FCP forum.

I am in a pickle. And goes to show that even people who are FCP Gurus and forum leaders aren't infallible.

Well, I am still awaiting my MacPro. Everything else has arrived: Kona 3 with K-BOX, HD10AVA, RAM, X1900XT Graphics card...heck, I even bought the pieces to the desk I intend to build today. I am discussing the arrival of my machine on this thread on the Apple forums. Trying to build tension, and have fun discussions that aren't meant to solve issues.

I'll post desk pics when I get the thing together. I bought various pieces at Ikea, but the design will be unique.