Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 188)

Chapter 14 Determining Your Hard Disk Storage Options 187
III
Note: Active terminators have an indicator light that goes on when the SCSI chain
is powered.
All devices on a SCSI chain run at the speed of the slowest device. To achieve a high
level of performance, connect only Ultra2 or faster SCSI disk drives to your SCSI
interface card. Otherwise, you may impede performance and get dropped frames
during capture or playback.
Note: Many kinds of SCSI devices are slower than Ultra2, including scanners and
removable storage media. You should not connect such devices to your high-
performance SCSI interface.
Using a RAID or Disk Array
You can improve the transfer speed of individual disks by configuring multiple disk
drives in a disk array. In a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), multiple SCSI,
ATA, or FireWire disk drives are grouped together via hardware or software and treated
as a single data storage unit. This allows you to record data to multiple drives in
parallel, increasing access time significantly. You can also partition the array into
multiple volumes.
Creating a disk array is only necessary if high performance is required to capture and
play back your video at the required data rate without dropping frames.
If you require rock-solid data integrity, consider purchasing a RAID, or Redundant Array
of Independent Disks. Many RAIDs record the same data on more than one disk, so that
if a drive fails, the same data can still be retrieved from another disk. There are many
RAID variations available, but one that offers high performance for both digital video
capture and data redundancy is RAID level 3. Because they use specialized hardware,
RAID level 3 systems can be more expensive, but they should be considered whenever
the safety of your media is more important than the cost of your disks.
Computer
SCSI
card
SCSI cable SCSI cable
SCSI terminator
SCSI cable