Firewire Hd: 400 Or 800?!?, External hard drive Options

[Nels]

Trevor,

Just had to commend you on your concise explanation/description. Doesn't get much better than that.

Great Post!

Happy Holidays to all!

[ourmanflinty]

well, do the maths. real world sustained 32meg / second equates to around 180 stereo 16 bit 44.1 tracks!!! so 24 bit should be around 120!! how many tracks will your drive record?? did i get this wrong??



did bearfeats say he was getting 32Mbytes/s to a 7200 drive? did he mean bits or bytes? that can't be right, my maths is wrong surely...someone else work it out please..

[ourmanflinty]

umm, one big file as in the barefeats tests shown doesn't completely convince me that it's good for audio, obviously the drive can take a lot of data, the manufacturer states 56 to 29 Mbytes/sec sustained which will use up a fw400 bus and more! 50MB/sec theoretical and 32 or above in the real world. I don't usually copy many big single files over, any paparazzi or video editors on here?
That's a 3 platter 6 head drive, if you went for the 60GB option you're down to 1 platter 2 heads, read the datasheet, and one third of the data rates he saw in his test. Now how many can you get on a fw400 bus?

If you talk about track count then you are recording or playing back lots of seperate files to a drive, with edits perhaps and other data in the bitstream, faster spinning more platters and more heads make a difference. I expect that drive may achieve 60+ 44.1 16 bit tracks but I'd like to see some track count based firewire comparison tests wouldn't you??

[Vincent Online]

Hmmm I appreciate this thred... I've having some challenges right now...

I have a PowerBook G4/1.33Ghz a Lacie FW800 Drive, DP 4.5 and the MOTU 828 MKII (FW400) interface. Things are bogging down pretty quickly.. I wondered if the PowerBook G4's FW400 and FW800 ports used different channels or do I need to get a PCMCIA card to have another channel?

Thanks!
-Vincent

[ourmanflinty]

You need to find out where the problem is, try going to the internal drive instead first, you should get a decent amount of tracks to that. How much ram do you have? It can contribute.

Just a thought, but I'd heard that DP OSX wasn't the fastest / best written program on the block so can you try a different program?

[Vincent Online]

You need to find out where the problem is, try going to the internal drive instead first, you should get a decent amount of tracks to that. How much ram do you have? It can contribute.

Just a thought, but I'd heard that DP OSX wasn't the fastest / best written program on the block so can you try a different program?

I get better response than from the internal drive. I've got a Gig of Ram. DP's the only one that I want to use, I'm just looking to optimize it as much as possible : )

Thanks,
Vincent

[ourmanflinty]

bogs down pretty quick, any details? how many tracks etc what bit rates, samples streaming from te drive or in memory etc etc