Granite Digital FireWire 800 Hot-Swap Series - Manual (Page 7)

Granite Digital • 3101 Whipple Rd. • Union City, Ca. 94587 www.granitedigital.com
USERS GUIDE Page 7
Drivers and OS Issues - System Requirements
Macintosh Computers :
The G3 was one of the first computers to offer FireWire as an on-board
port. These machines like the rest of the Apple products use a 6-pin connec-
tor. The 6-pin connector supplies bus power, as opposed to the 4-pin con-
nector on cameras and on some laptops that do not offer bus power. The
new G5’s also supports the 800Mbps 9 pin connector.
If running our drive on one of the older Macs like the G3, be aware
that sustained data transfer rates will not be as good as with the newer
machines. Technology has improved dramatically and true data transfer
rates have tripled as the FireWire 1394 technology has progressed. The
older machines can achieve about a 14MB/s (Megabytes per second) sus-
tained data transfer rate while the new ones go much faster.
The early G4 models are a bit faster than the original G3s. If using a
DV Camera and FireWire as a storage device, we advise that this is the mini-
mum platform to use for achieving good quality results. DV uses approxi-
mately 4MB/s (Megabytes per second) in order to capture data but then there
is also the application overhead and the reverse data stream back to the
FireWire storage device. Adding it all together, about 12-14 MB/s
(Megabytes per second) is needed to get perfect results. Adding more memo-
ry will allow your application program to run more efficiently. We recom-
mend at least 256MBs of RAM memory as a minimum.
The G4’s along with the other new generation G5 Macintosh's will run
FireWire Hard Drives at very close to the 40MB/s (Megabyte per second) or
the new 80MB/s FireWire 800 limit. This means that combining a fast 7200
rpm hard drive mechanism in one of our drive enclosures will help to
achieve speeds well into the 40 plus MB/s (MegaBytes per second) range.
Additionally, using multiple FireWire channels and RAIDing (striping) two or
more channels together, speeds close to 150MB/s can be achieved. RAID
software is available from a variety of third party manufacturers and also it’s
built into the OSX operating system.