For instance, you have a magnetic record/playback head that is floating just microns over the surface of the disk. In order to expand the density of the disk, Seagate has constructed the surface of the disk to record separate tracks of data - kind of like the old stereo vinyl records. So the head now has to be able to "steer" itself in the y and z-axis to capture and write data. As an analogy, think of a jet fighter, cruising over the Mojave dessert at about ten feet altitude and executing 10 degree banks and yaws without crashing. Now think about making that environment rugged enough that you could drop the hard drive from three feet to a tile floor - kind of like being in that jet when there's a 10 Ricther earthquake. Now imagine several jets flying in unison! Well, it gets pretty cerebral.

And this was three years ago Internet time, which in Earth time is like a decade. Is it any wonder that Seagate has now come out with a series of Cheetah drives that spin at an incredible 15,000 rpms, offering seek times as low as 3.6 milliseconds?

New Fast Drives from Seagate

Just released, the Seagate Cheetah X15 comes in 36 and 18 gigabyte sizes, list pricing at $699.00 and $419.00 respectively supports Ultra160, Ultra 320 SCSI and 2 Gbit Fibre Channel Interfaces. These new drives occupy a realm of high performance designated as Ultra160 SCSI. Basically, Ultra160 supports data bus rates of 160 megabytes per second. These drives, in my opinion, are well suited to serve as your media storage drives in animation, video compression, nonlinear editing and music production.

Consider what this means in desktop computer assisted media production. When used as a single drive, the Cheetah X-15 can sustain a data rate of up to 69 Mbytes per second. When ganged in a RAID 0 (striped) array as a pair, the array achieves a combined rate of 138MB/sec. This expansion in cobmined rates continues to increase until you hit the wall at 160MB/sec at which point data begins to wait, just like in any traffic jam.

In real life, however, a striped array of between 4-6 drives should do fairly well on an Ultra160 bus where the demand hardly ever achieves full data rates. If this should occur, your solution would be to add a second Ultra160 card and raise the limit to 320 MB/sec.

Using just one X-15, however, produces significant improvements. When you are writing frame-by-frame sequences from an animation program or using a media drive in a nonlinear editing, DVD authoring, or audio mastering system, your files are going to go in and out of the hard drive at about seven times faster than a standard SCSI drive (operating at a peak of less than 10 Mbytes per second).

Does this sound trivial? Consider the creation of a one minute HDTV commercial, where 1,800 frames, composed of 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels, amount to about 22 gigabytes of material. Just copying that data ONCE to another drive - as backup - will take about 40 minutes on a good, standard SCSI drive. Using the best Ultra160 drive, you can do the job in about 6 minutes. Consider how your hard drive is called upon throughout the day - as a scratch disc, source, virtual memory - and you can easily see how the access times eat insidiously into your billable rate.

As a desktop media professional, your computer is no doubt very fast. So fast, that it is no longer the bottleneck of your creativity - the hard drive is.

Listen to Steve Briggs, of the High Performance Technical Computing
division of Compaq. Steve sells high end computing systems to the core
of the Hollywood computer generated imagery market. In a recent phone
interview, Steve noted, "Throughout the Hollywood production industry,
the demand is for faster hard drives. We've already got computers, like
our Alpha Server ES45, whose 4-bus I/O channel processes in excess of a
gigabyte per second. If the hard drives can't deliver the elements for
processing or record the images when completed as fast as the computer's
CPUs (central processing units), guess what is going to keep you from a
cold beer and warm bed? The hard drive."

We received our first X-15 about a month ago and installed it on our Compaq W-8000, a computer which is used in our shop for animation creation and rendering. The system also serves as a backup NLE running Leitch dpsVelocity (see Videography June 2000 for review of dpsVelocity). Since the dpsVelocity system requires pairs of matched drives for video storage, and we had only one X-15, we installed the 36 gigabyte X-15 to store graphics, rendered frames and audio. The X-15 worked faultlessly and significantly improved the workflow between our NLE and the onboard DVD burner that comes standard in the W-8000.

After a few weeks in the Compaq, we moved the drive over to our IBM Intellistation Z Pro, which is employed strictly as an animation and graphics workstation, equipped with an Epson Perfection 2450, firewire capable scanner for acquiring flat art. Again, the X-15 installed easily and improved performance on data intensive image swapping and effects work.

Adaptec Ups the Ante

Of course, you aren't going to get away with buying just the Seagate hard drive. If you want to extract the maximum speed this drive is capable of producing, you have to upgrade your SCSI controller card. Here, you'll need something like the Adaptec
ASC-29160N SCSI PCI card (list price: $332.00). This card supports the Ultra160 SCSI internal protocols that maximize the capabilities of any SCSI drives. Therefore, if you are installing the ASC-29160N in a legacy system, you can use all your older SCSI drives (you may have to purchase connector adaptors).

If you don't want to spring for a new SCSI card, you can, of course, connect the X-15 drives to any other form of SCSI controller, but they will perform to the lower specifications of the older bus. Seagate recommends the Adaptec Ultra160 cards for maximum performance. Even as the companies' Ultra160 products combine to deliver top performance, Seagate and Adaptec are looking to 2002, having successfully conducted joint compatibility and reliability tests of their Ultra320 SCSI products in preparation for next year's introduction of Adaptec's Ultra320 controllers.

Test Results

Under dpsVelocity, the performance was about equal to the Seagate ultra wide media drive the X-15 replaced - no significant advantage could be noticed. Then we ran some animation and compositing jobs through the drive using Discreet's 3D Studio Max 4.0 and Combustion, Eyeon's Digital Fusion, Adobe Illustrator 10, Adobe Photoshop 6.0, and Sonic Foundry's Acid Pro 3.0, music looping software. Here, we noticed significant improvements that could quickly add up to several hours per week. Animation sequences completed 5%-10% faster.

The compositing process in Combustion and Digital Fusion was noticeably quicker especially in retrieving large floating layers. Adobe's products performed significantly better, especially when applying filters, storing and retrieving large picture elements and scans.

In Acid Pro 3.0, we often dub popular samples to the hard drive and display them on the screen for quick application in a composition. One of the lag points to date in Acid was the limitation of this list's capability of playing the samples instantly when clicked. If there were a lot of samples active, the playback from the media drive would often choke up. Not anymore with the X-15. Evaluating the cumulative benefits of using most of the above software products on a typical corporate or commercial production, I'd estimate that the purchase price of the 36 gig drive would be amortized conservatively in about three to four weeks.

Installation

Even in the Windows environment, installation is pretty simple, even if you don't have a lot of experience under the hood and toll-free technical support is available both from Seagate and Adaptec. The first step is to configure the hard drive by assigning a SCSI address using simple jumper pins. Then turn off the computer and mount the drive using standard 3.5" form factor hardware.

Be sure to allow lots of cooling room around the drive and while you're inside the cabinet, make sure the computer's fans are adequate, clean and running up to speed. Although the Seagate Cheetahs are rated at 1.2 million hours MBTF (mean time before failure) running these drives above their maximum rated environmental temperature significantly affects their lifetime.

Next, insert the Adaptec card into any available PCI slot and connect the drive(s) with a SCSI ribbon cable. The card allows up to 15 drives to be connected. Most likely you can junk any other SCSI adapters you have and chain all your drives to the 29160N since Adaptec's SpeedFlex technology, available on the internal connection, will maximize the performance of all the drives, regardless of generation. Be sure that the last drive on the chain is terminated. Most of the new SCSI cables now come with terminators built-in, but you may need to buy one.

Once all the hardware is installed and connected, close up the computer and turn it on. If you succeeded in properly installing everything you should see the drives identify themselves in the black and white startup screen (assuming you are running a PC). After Windows settles down, go to Start/Accessories/Disk Administrator and let the system identify the new drive. You will recognize it because it will be the only one that is not identified with a letter. Click on the drive's box to select it, then go to Tools/Format. Formatting a 36 gigabyte drive will take quite a few minutes, so go have lunch. When the drive is formatted, you can assign it a letter by clicking Tools/Assign Drive Letter and you can name the drive. Once done, you may have to reboot your system. Once rebooted, you now have one very fast drive, ready for video, music, frame sequences or any other media that makes money.

Technical Support

I have to admit, I ran into two snags while installing the new drives, but this allowed me the chance to test Seagate and Adaptec's technical support. In both cases, live technicians were on phone in less than 5 minutes. My Seagate call regarded the failure of my boot log to see the new drive. The solution was a SCSI ID conflict with a Seagate tape storage device that I had forgotten ran on the SCSI bus. The technician directed me to change the X-15's SCSI ID jumper to another address.

The Adaptec call involved the installation of a new Panasonic SW9501-S external DVD burner, that I acquired for an upcoming article on DVD authoring. In addition to the internal Ultra160 drives, the Adaptec 29160 provides an external 68-pin LVD SCSI port for Ulrtra 160 external SCSI devices. The Panasonic drive was giving me troubles until I discovered the very handy self terminating switch on the back of the drive cabinet. Laudably, the Adaptec technician suspected such a switch existed - kudos!

Enduring Products

I have been running Seagate drives on Adaptec controllers exclusively for over five years, some nearly daily and to date have not had any failures. Seagate claims that the new X 15s are built to withstand greater shocks and to use less power (read less heat generated) than their predecessors. Seagate also makes claims to protect their drives with what they call a "3D Defense System" (Drive, Data, Diagnostic). Frankly, I don't know much about this, because I've never been in a position to consider my Seagates under enough risk to explore the claim. I can't say this about other manufacturers, whose drives I have used, which, over the years, have locked up, crashed or plain lost data at the worst imaginable times. But whenever that happened, I replaced them with Seagates.

These are worrisome times and, like me, maybe you still fret over the possibility of a drive failing in the middle of a crucial job. Okay, for you folks, there's a new software program from Executive Software called Drive Alert. You gotta get this. It's a set-it-and-forget-it program that monitors all the drives on your computer according to a wide range of parameters. Whenever any of your drives exhibit behavior that varies from the parameters, a warning appears on your screen, allowing you to estimate the remaining lifetime of the drive. The software is quite elaborate for users who want to customize their protection. It even provides tools for your computer to communicate with you over a network or even by email and phone! A more detailed review of Drive Alert may be found in the December 2001 issue of Videography, under my "New Products for Producers, Part VI" review.