SATA 2 HD with very fast sustained transfer rate

Thats typical for most, and your 90MB/s would be too close for my comfort zone for sustained transfer rates required.

How about SSD disks? They go much faster, at least double.

Otherwise, I'd recommend a RAID of disks, although for embedded situations, SSD would probably work better.

Keep in mind that the OS and the system overhead is likely to reduce the HDD raw transfer rate to a half or so.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

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No OS here! There might have to be software to manage the Link Layer stuff, but that could be on a dedicated (soft) processor...

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Do you need "90MB/s" *continuously* (sustained indefinitely)?

Keep in mind that you still have to be able to *move* 90MB/s through your filesystem stack (i.e., make sure your OS-I/O can actually do what you need).

And, recall the drive will also do periodic thermal recalibrations which will reduce the drive's "availability", temporarily.

As others already mentioned, RAID systems can easily reach transfer rates of several hundred megabytes/sec using commercial level disks.

For a recent example, I just installed Solaris 11 on an HP Proliant Microserver. Simple tests using dd and files of 1Gb and 2Gb produced more than 200Mb/sec on an redundant (raidz2) disk pool, and close to

Other options:

You can buy external enclosures that would "strip" a group of disks. without the need to configure an external OS, drivers, etc. They came with eSATA, fiberchannel or iSCSI (ethernet) interfaces. (eSATA may require disk multiplexing support from your SATA interface)

If you have (or can add) a fast network interface, iSCSI may be a good approach..

For RAID based solutions, the bottleneck is more likely to be on how to transfer the data to the disk array system, not to the disks themselves.

Try asking in a file server or data base server forum. Those guys need to solve this type of problem every day.

-- Roberto Waltman

For example, (anything but SATA)

-- Roberto Waltman

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Yes. That is the per-channel raw data rate.

As mentioned previously, no OS.

Not good. Unless I can turn them off during capture sessions.

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Yes, but (below) you mention "capture sessions" -- suggesting there are "non-capture sessions" as well. So, the question then becomes, how long (in terms of data) are these sessions?

OK. But you'll still need a mechanism to move bytes from the application layer down through to the I/O subsystem.

A/V drives don't run these calibration cycles (or at least not as *often*).

You may be able to "ride one out" if you have enough buffering in the host (plus the drive itself). You'd have to look at the specifics of each drive (I've never had to deal with that aspect).