Buying Credits in Taiwan - Only Foreigners Must Pr...

Question

The Taiwan government requires that foreigners in Taiwan submit a scanned copy of their passport in order to buy Skype credits. So the sole third party website that collects payments for Skype must require this. The law applies only to foreigners, i.e., non-Taiwanese citizens.
If you simply make the mistake of attempting to purchase credits through Skype's website while in Taiwan, your account will be "hijacked" by PChome, so even after you leave Taiwan you can no longer buy credits except through that vendor. And you will have to trust them with ID in addition to your credit card information.
Discriminatory cell phone contracts and banking policies have the rationale that foreigners might skip town without paying, but that is not the issue in this case. It's hard to think of any other reason for demanding multipe ID than facilitating surveillance of foreigners.
Complaints should be directed at Skype, PChome and the government of Taiwan.
The solution if you refuse to comply is to use another service. Here are some free or nearly free alternatives that don't require ID:
* Facebook video chats
* Facetime
* Google Voice (lets you call land lines from a computer)
* Gmail "hangouts" (video calling that is enabled through intstant messaging function
* Gmail also lets you call land lines by simply clicking on any phone number contained in an email.

Answer 1

I haven't the faintest idea. I only use DV, HDV and XDCAM-EX/HD and have never tried it with any (RED) 4K material. I assume it should be sufficient to handle that. But let's be honest, when I increased my raid array from 10 to 12 disks, I did not notice ANY performance gains. The limiting factor must be the PCI-e bus or the Areca controller, that just does not show any improvements from adding a couple of disks. Another thing to consider is that the various benchmark programs widely in use show quite different results.
As an example, here are two images from HD Tune Pro, one for my 2 disk raid0 on the Marvell chip and the other from my 12 disk raid30 array. First of all, HD Tune shows the wrong size, it is not 2199 GB but should be 10000 GB (at least that is what Areca claims as shown in the last picture), second it ONLY performs at around 745 MB/s transfer rate.
The most noteworthy item to look at is the rapid performance degradation of this raid0 when the disks get fuller. An average transfer rate of 165 MB/s is quite acceptable for a 2 disk setup, but seeing it go down to below 100 MB/s when the disks fill up is bothersome. It will not allow you to handle uncompressed HD at all.