User`s guide

AVoption & AVoption XL Guide 10
Audio AVoption XL can store audio data to mul-
tiple hard drives. You should allocate audio
tracks to different hard drives manually. “Round
robin” disk allocation is not recommended in a
system that includes video drives.
Both of these options are covered in detail in the
Pro Tools Reference Guide .
Video AVoption XL can capture a contiguous
video track to multiple hard disks. This is useful
if the length of your video session exceeds the
storage space available on a single drive. For ex-
ample, 26 minutes of video material, using 3:1
compression, requires approximately 11.1 GB of
storage space. To store this much video, you
need two 9 GB hard drives.
SCSI Hardware and Drives with
Video Compression Level 2:1 or
1:1
If you are using 2:1 or 1:1 video compression,
your system requires two SCSI accelerators: the
ATTO EPCI-UL2D LVD accelerator, and the
ATTO EPCI-DC or Digidesign SCSI 64. In this
scenario, video drives are connected to the
EPCI-UL2D, and audio drives are connected to
the EPCI-DC or SCSI 64. Or, two EPCI-DC’s may
be used for this scenario.
Striped Drive Requirements
Striped drives are configured so that multiple
hard drives behave as if they are one hard drive.
This makes higher data throughput possible. 4-
way striped drives (4 drives acting as one) are re-
quired when capturing, importing, or playing
uncompressed (1:1) video. 2-way striped drives
(2 drives acting as one) are required when cap-
turing, importing, or playing 2:1 compressed
video.
2-way striped drives should be connected in
pairs to the EPCI-UL2D accelerator, with 1 drive
connected to each channel.
4-way striped drives should be connected in
pairs to the EPCI-UL2D accelerator, with 2 or
more (in even amounts) drives connected to
each channel.
Pro Tools and AVoption XL do not support
striped audio drives.