CompuServe Messages

John, Gus has explained this way better than I ever could. The fact is all those quoted performance rates have nothing to do with the SUSTAINABLE throughput. That means the rate the drive can pump out data for long periods of time without a single pause or hiccup – forget cache, forget bus design – few drives are designed for this kind of _sustained_, uninterrupted throughput. They are generally geared towards small files, not the huge, long, animation sequences. Like I said and Gus said, even for the fastest hardrives this is still only in the 2-3MBps range. An Abekas is made up of a disk-array, meaning several drives and I'm sure they are custom made for that application and have proprietary formatting and other secret tricks. Your best bet is to find a dealer who will let you do a side-by-side comparison of an animation sequence _you_ have created, and already have layed-off via the svhs and/or Abekas route, and then compare the outputs of the DPS PAR side-by-side with the MAX and also your svhs and Abekas output. You'll then be able to decide if the extra money the MAX costs is justified in your circumstances. I'd hazard a guess that you'll decide it isn't, because the quality of either JPEG solution will NOT be good enough for your high-end clients, therefore the DPS PAR becomes an extremely cost-effective and fast way of doing colour and motion-tests for you and your clients approval. I still believe that for individuals or small animation companies the best total solution for the least money, that will give you equal quality output to anybody in the business is a PAR and a Exabyte.