a blog by Peter Leonard
No major hardware introductions at Apple's NAB booth this year, but I was glad to see a large number of Xserves and related hardware. Apple's now claiming the thoroughput of their Xraid disk array is sufficient for HDTV's 1080i standard, which happens to dovetail nicely with their efforts to shape FinalCut Pro 4 as an editor capable of handling resolutions from web to high-def. 1080i is about 125MBps, which is pretty heavy-duty. The Xraids have an independant IDE controller for each SCAII removable chassis, which actually makes sense - the chips must be really cheap nowadays, and even though their bandwidth individually may be less than SCSI, if you dedicate one controller per drive you have more than enough.