anyone using Lacie SATA D2 drive w/PCI interface?

[kgdrum]

hi i am planning my next system(yes a G5) and i want to avoid use of fw drives if possible,i am leaning towards a fw i/o(rme fireface 800)gonna add an internal drive for samples,along with boot drive and i saw this external drive solution
LaCie 250gb 7200RPM SATA D2 Drive with PCI interface(looks pretty cool!)
1- is anyone using this w/success?
2-can you use mac drivers or do you have to use lacie's?(i have/had a lacie scsi drive that perfomed better without lacie software)until it went bad (not sure if its a bad drive or bad scsi card)adaptec 39160
I want to have a system that can work for the next 2-3 years while the intel/mac partership sorts itself out
i am trying to figure out if this is a better solution than adding a pci firewire card to keep audio hard drive on seperate fw buss than fw buss for i/o
any thought or comments?
thanks in advance

[JK]

Hi,

It is definitely a good idea to keep the HD off your firewire bus with your 896 on it. But I would not go for LaCies. Their performance is not all that great (I use a LaCie FW800). Medea makes (somewhat affordable) drives (called G-RAID or G-Sata) that ship with a PCI card (Sata) or run with a FW-800 card for the RAID's. You find info on the net. The RAID is good for throughput, but the acces time is not that much better than an internal Sata. The G-Sata on the other hand has two 10k drives built in that hook up to the included PCI card (the FW card doesn't need a driver on the MAC, I suppose that's true for the Sata card as well). They perform really well when you want to stream lots of different samples at the same time. I cannot guarantee it though, because I'm still waiting for mine... But I'll let you know how it works a soon as it gets here. Can't wait...

Hope that helps
JK

[kgdrum]

thanks for the reply i have a bad lacie scsi drive so i don't have to stick w/ them.....i am not sure if i want to go raid,i wanna use as 2 separate drives (1-audio 2-backup)is that possible w/this kind of setup?,please let me know how this works out for you
thanks KG
kgdrum@yahoo.com