G5 + 002 + External Hd Setup, What's the best way to set it up? Options

[cybercampbell]

Hi all

I just have a simple question...how should I set my system up?

I have:

Mac G5 Dual 2Ghz
Digi002
Internal 160Gig HD (with Tiger on it)
Internal 160Gig HD (spare)
External FW HD (Currently my Audio Drive)

I get Drive too slow errors and I still get CPU errors which I hate and was the reason for upgrading to the G5.

What is the best setup? The G5 has 2 Firewire posts, 1x 400 Mbit/s and 1x 800 Mbit/s ( I know you guys know this ).

The Digi002 has 2x Firewire 400Mbit/s Ports.

I can have my audio drive as the Internal main drive, internal secondry drive or external Firewire drive 400Mbit/s or 800Mbit/s.

I also have a 6 pin to 9 pin firewire cable.

Any ideas?

Is it better to run the 002 on the 800Mbit/s port or the Audio Drive? what need to work faster?

Any help will be much appreciated.

Cheers
Cybercampbell

[ourmanflinty]

Wow lots of info!
Are the refils on the same drive as the PT audio? Are you using samples in PT as well as audio tracks? Basically spread the load, move the refils and the reason sound files to a different drive , like the spare internal. This internal will be much faster than the firewire drive anyway. The 002 will not run any better on the fw800 bus. The drive might, is it a fw800 drive?
The running out of cpu power is a funny one but try lowering the limit ok? Try 50%. Lower latencies also up the ante there and tax the cpu. Lower the limit in Reason too to stop them both competing for space. At leat till things stabilize and then move them up..You also have a few widgets running there, get rid. You need to strip the system down to minmize possible conflicts, I don't use tiger yet ( PT TDM mix on quicksilver DP800, PT 6.4.1, 10.3.8 and PT 5.13 on OS 9.2.2 ) but I'll bet a pound to a bucket of ferrets that they like a bit of resource when it comes time to update and they will get right up Pro Tools nose especially when sucking data off the net and waiting for busy servers etc, constantly bothering the OS for cpu time it's like running hundreds, well, you know, a couple, of progs at a time all fighting for net and cpu and memory and your poor DAW is trying it's hardest to grab bandwith to protect your session.
You can up the DAE buffer size from level 2 to higher, this will make drive acces easier as it buffers more and reduces drive access overhead, it'll make playback slower to start on heavy sessions and it will need more RAM. With your track count though I'm tempted to say lower it to free up ram and move the audio to the spare internal, much faster than a fw400 drive..
No it's not enough RAM, nowhere near, this half your problem. 512 was hardly enough in OS9 with Pro Tools and DAE. Tiger is very hungry, so is PT, so is Reason. You have a cpu based audio engine in PT that is trying to allocate ram for its hardware buffers and each track needs it, plugs need it, os needs it, programs need. Double it at least, much more if you can afford it.
Pro Tools and Reason like to pre-allocate themselves resources so they can guarantee performance. So when the cpu tells them there's not enough availiable they cry, even if they don't need it right now. You're lucky, back in the day everything used to just freeze...

To summarize...

More RAM and leave the widgets in your beer can