Avastor – offering a broad range of storage and integration solutions for the professional digital content creator. See why Avastor should be your storage supplier
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Avastor – offering a broad range of storage and integration solutions for the professional digital content creator. See why Avastor should be your storage supplier |
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Back to The Avastor Advantage: Features The Avastor Advantage
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Read more about the Oxford chipsets, http://www.oxsemi.com/oxford/documents/pages/ieee1394/index.html |
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4. High Performance Hard Drives
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Back to The Avastor Advantage: Features
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The number one “killer” of hard disk drives is heat. Any hard-drive-intensive activity will cause your drive to heat up and you don’t want your hard drive to over-heat any more than you’d want your car to. Production of heat goes hand-in-hand with power dissipation. As a hard drive consumes more power, it radiates more heat into the relatively cramped confines of an external drive enclosure. To maintain the drive at an optimal temperature, this heat must then be expelled, not dissipated, and a fan is the best way to do this. In fact, some external drive manufacturers whose drives use the “dissipation” method to cool the hard drives, have added fans to their newer models. We think that’s a good thing, which is why every Avastor HDX drive is equipped with a low noise fan.
There is only one choice for the bridge chipset, which converts the hard disk drive IDE (parallel) data to FireWire (serial) data - the Oxford Semiconductor 91x series chipset. Some high-end enclosures use the Oxford chipset; however, more and more enclosure manufacturers are switching to lower cost chipsets that have compatibility and reliability issues - problems you don’t need. At Avastor, we only use the Oxford 91x series chipset in every drive we ship. 
The incorporation of the power supply within the enclosure offers the professional user many advantages. For example, often drives are shipped to studios and edit suites worldwide; this means the enclosure must be compatible with the local plug type and voltage. With the HDX, it is no problem finding a world standard IEC cord with the correct plug to power up the world standard 100/240 VAC 50/60 Hz power supply. The HDX internal power supply supplies a healthy 3 plus amps of power to the internal drive mechanism. Many external DC power supplies offer less than the minimum current needed by the hard drive, which can undermine the read/write performance by underpowering the actuator arm in the drive mechanism. In other words, track count/edit density and recording resolution are all compromised. Why impose these limitations and take a chance on the drive failing to perform during your session or live recording date? Additionally, with drives that use external power adapters (wall wart, brick, etc) it very possible that the hard drive may not perform at its maximum due to current loss over the long run of thin wires between the drive and the adapter; on some drives it can be as much as 3 to 4 feet. Plus, with the IEC cord that comes with the HDX, there is no bulky wall wart to carry around - or even worse, lose and try to replace.
If your drives are not giving you the track count, edit density, or frame rate you were expecting, then check and see what type of drive is in your enclosure. Many drive manufacturers only ship drives with 2 MB of cache and some even ship 5400 RPM drives - this is totally unacceptable of Audio/Video work. 
On the other hand, all Avastor HDX drives ship exclusively with 7200 RPM 8 MB cache drives from Hitachi and Western Digital. Our testing has shown these drives have the performance and reliability demanded by A/V pros.