HD For Indies

i saw this too a couple weeks ago on this site...

http://www.cooldrives.com/sapciadsaian.html

i think we'll be able to convert our "old" sata boxes to new multilane connections quite easily when macs get the card...
 

Isn't that an InfiniBand cable? NOT a regular SATA cable.
 

This is NOT a port multiplier setup. It uses a "mulit-lane" connector and cable (Infiniband). It uses a four port SATA card to bring over four SATA connections in a single cable and then connect to four disk drives. Each drive has a dedicated 1.5 or 3.0 Gb/s path.

A true port multiplier setup uses a single SATA port, connector and cable (single lane) to go over to an enclosure that uses another "port multiplier" chip to "fan out" to up to five (5) additional drives. All five (5) drives must SHARE a 1.5 or 3.0 Gb/s path.
 

The new Sil 3132(host adapter) and Sil-3726 (port multiplier) are real multipliers for SATA-2 enclosures.

If we combine this:

http://www.cooldrives.com/sapciexsaii3.html

with this:

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cooldrives/cosapomubrso.html

We get 10 ports of with native RAID-5 support on a single PCIe x1 slot which is still fast enough for uncompressed 2K. Its also available on any new computer. Plus, you can scale to multiple hosts, each with 250MB per second of throughput per card.

A single host adapter and port multiplier with 6-10 ports total and raid-5 costs only $150 to upgrade. Theorectically, someone without a dual processor server with PCI-X slots could still edit 2K with cards like these and the BMD Multibridge Extreme for PCIe.

What about a system that can playback multiple streams of uncompressed 1080p in real-time for around 5K...

-2x Sil SATA host cards and 4x Sil port multiplier (20 ports total)
$500

-20 Pack of Maxtor SATA 200Gb drives (10 drive internal, 10 drive external, 2 Hrs uncompressed 2K per RAID-5)
$2000 (love these drives)

- Single socket Dual Core PC with MB/CPU/RAM plus HDD,PCI Video, PSU and Lian-Li V1000 Aluminum Case
$2000 (love this case)

-1920x1200 LCD Monitor with DVI/Component/VGA switching
$1000 (love my dell)

Setup would also includes Gigabit Ethernet for upgrading to SAN, iSCSI and LTO Tape Backup (using onboard or x1 PCIe card)

Then add expensive stuff like capture devices, HD decks, CMOS cameras, tape libraries, etc. At least you can rent that stuff and do editing on your own system for free.

Here the page where I found this stuff: http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cooldrives/usb20cdrwdvd.html