External Hard Drives, Do I really need Glyph? |
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ven. 28 juin 2002, 00:49
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I'm getting a Powerbook and will be running ProTools LE and Absynth...at least for now. Some guys at a music store I am working with are making me think that I need a Glyph drive for my external hard drive. Now, I do know that i want an external drive, because i don't want to tax the Powerbook drive with the audio I record and playback. But, the Glyph drives are so expensive. I just looked at a Mac Warehouse Catelog and saw 7200 RPM, 80gig firewire drives for a little over $200. Won't this suffice. The 80gig Glyph Companion drive is $500.
Anybody using drives from LaCie, Que, etc? Any problems or rumored problems?
Thanks, Tim.
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ven. 28 juin 2002, 18:41
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First off, im no expert, and i dont really know what ur talking about. Im assuming that Glyph (spelling?) is a brand? well i dont see any reason why you would need to get a certain brand drive for audio, as long as it is a reputable name, and it is fast enough (at least 72,000 rpm), then i would say it should work fine
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sam. 29 juin 2002, 03:11
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Hum… Do you really want to put a foot on the ladder of the 'digi said and wants some cash' stairway to the seven golden cards obsolete in 2 years… The premium price you pay is to have the right to put a dirve in an enclosure like the digi. Is it worth ? BTW, the drive inside has the same MTBF as the others on the market, so  Take a good IDE drive, like discostu131 (and some find my avatar long and hard  said, maybe in firewire, or if you want with his own IDE card and go! Premium for nothing but a label on a box is SLAVERY.
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lun. 23 sept. 2002, 17:10
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QUOTE (Tim @ Jun 27 2002, 23:49) But, the Glyph drives are so expensive. I just looked at a Mac Warehouse Catelog and saw 7200 RPM, 80gig firewire drives for a little over 0. Won't this suffice. The 80gig Glyph Companion drive is 0.
Anybody using drives from LaCie, Que, etc? Any problems or rumored problems?
Thanks, Tim. back to the point, NO you do not need to use a glyph. sorry rickenbacker, i'm not trying to p*$$ you off here, but the extra cash glyph demand is not warranted. we ARE talking ide drives here! these drives, although fast, are nowhere near as reliable as scsi drives, can only be expected to live for a couple of years, and an extra internal drive will definitely out perform a firewire drive every time AND save loads of cash.  synthetic, i'm not trying to p*$$ you off either, but a firewire drive IS an ide drive, it can only work as fast as the firewire to ide bus inside it will allow! ultimately, my advice would have to be, buy a seagate barracuda and fit it internally...
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mar. 24 sept. 2002, 19:26
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Aha! I use an Mbox too. I didn't realise they'd made a nice quiet portable drive for us to stick in our little shoulderbag with all the rest. Found the glyph page: http://www.glyphtech.com/FRAMESET-AUDIO-pr...s-companion.htmHowever, I live in France and I can't find it on the French web. Not on the UK web either. Hum! I mustn't be searching right. Still, on the Gyph site they give a tel n° in the UK for European enquiries. It looks great for roaming Mbox users - ah! I've just found the price for the 80Gb on zzounds.com: 500$ - hum
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mer. 25 sept. 2002, 00:18
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hi rickenbacker, just trying to be polite. i've been bashed too much to simply state my opinion! i appreciate the after sales service that glyph apparently provide, always good to hear. the price however, sounds unjustifiable, this drive costs almost as much as the mbox itself. i use an 80gb "icewarrior" or "icecube" as it's called (from box clever), on my powerbook setup. it cost less than 200 quid, contains a seagate barracuda, the defacto pro standard hard drive, has no fan, looks incredible (it's pictured in my avatar), AND the build quality is exemplary. i recommend you check it out at www.macandmore.com. the main issue for me with firewire drives is the fact that new drives are being released soon that double the throughput speed! as i've said, it's only an ide drive being addressed by a firewire to ide bus. the bus is the real issue! peace, good luck, later...
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mer. 25 sept. 2002, 10:01
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I've been thinking. I'm a bit slow but here's my reasoning.
With the 80Gb disk, according to zzounds, you can record 280 minutes of 24-track, 24-bit audio at 48kHz. This means you can record 56 hours with the 2-track Mbox, or 14 hours with an 8-track Motu 828 - all in one go.
(The 80Gb M Project Plus from Glyph has a 4-port FW hub, so if you have three 828s, you can do 24-track recording. But then, you're not worried about Glyph prices, are you?)
Now, let's say you've got 10 Gb free on the internal drive. With that, you can go out without your external drive and record 7 hours of 2-track, or nearly 2 hours of 8-track. You can then come back and put it on your external and go out and start again.
My conclusion is that for recording with an Mbox or 828, your external drive needs to be neither portable nor silent, as you don't need to use it for live recording.
I therefore opt for a not as portable, noisier, not matching, but much cheaper, other-than-Glyph drive.
Is there a flaw?
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mer. 25 sept. 2002, 11:42
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i don't know whether the glyph is better but as far as firewire drives go I have a La Cie 80 gig and it's pretty reliable (I even dropped it pretty hard by mistake). The Que is much slimmer and more portable though. My friend had one and I was pretty jealous.
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jeu. 26 sept. 2002, 00:59
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hi rickenbacker, the noise is, as with the glyph, almost never audible, and when the fan (if there is one) IS on, only superman would be bothered by it! the build and design are pretty faultless, i did however, specify that i wanted a barracuda inside (an extra 10 quid) ! i've used it on some heavy sessions, transferring large protools sessions to it and working with these in logic on a tibook 800 using the icebox as my audio drive with no problems at all. from what i've read, the new firewire bus is due VERY soon, hold onto that cash!
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jeu. 26 sept. 2002, 05:01
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We had already a thread on this… If you really want to pay to mostly have a HD matched to your DAW hardware and with express replacement, it's ok for me. Personnally I prefer spend my money in some other serious gear, and eventually go buy a new HD if need arises… The fine tuning you can make it yourself in HDT, but a good little raid made at home is at reach of everybody.
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jeu. 26 sept. 2002, 17:04
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Just a note to all about an experience that I have had with a particular manufacturer. I have a Que M3 firewire drive that completely failed on me and sent it in with a Que firewire CDRW burner that also never worked from day one. I consider myself more than a power user, but not to the point of abusing any of my equipment by any means. That said, I returned said drives and went on a month long business trip and fully (and rightfully ) expected to see my drives waiting for me when I got back. But alas, they had not been returned and I had to spend two weeks trying to get them to return my drives that they said they would take care of. I was hung up on, ignored, put on hold and argued with at every turn and messages completely ignored from the customer service rep on up to the VP. They had the drives sitting in shipping waiting for approval to get shipped back out, but they were sitting on them for some unknown reason, which pretyy much means they didn't have their stuff together- at all. I finally got ahold of the shipping manager and politely aprised him of my situation and asked him to send the drives out ASAP. I had them in two days.
To have two drives from the same company fail is scary. To have received such horrible customer service is reprehensible. To have a new drive that still doesn't work as well as it could says that I should warn all to stay away from Que drives, even for simple backup. That was all I was using it for and it just stunk.
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ven. 27 sept. 2002, 15:44
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"...noticed that some recordings seemed to have minor skips or "hicups" in some tracks" Thanks Synthetic. I've often heard not to use the internal drive for audio, but never been told why. I haven't therefore taken the warnings seriously. Haven't noticed the hiccup/skip problem yet, but then I've not much experience either. For the moment I just trash what I don't like. "don't use your internal hd for audio recording/playback if it is the drive you boot your daw from! try to keep one third of the available space on your boot drive available. regularly optimize a regularly USED audio drive backup regularly... 8-)" Thanks for advice Damann too. I may follow it ;-) Any more info on why? Perhaps 1 or 2 track recording doesn't lead to the problems encountered with 8-tracks. Concerning 800Mb/sec FW, I wonder how many Mb/sec small projects really need.
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sam. 28 sept. 2002, 11:14
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Synthetic has got it exactly right - home recordists can produce some excellent work. It's probably not going to compete with a Shania Twain or Jamiroquai album, even if they are using the same software (I know Jay Kay used Logic Platinum to record his last album), but it's still going to sound pretty good. A lot of the early house records - and I'm talking massive global hits, here - were recorded on 4-track machines and mastered from cassette. This was the early '90s, too - not the '70s! So anything you can do on a modern Mac has the potential to sound fantastic. I've tried quite a few of the new USB interfaces (Mbox, both Tascam 428 and 224, Edirol UA-5 and UA-700, Swissonic Studio-D) and - in my opinion, for what it's worth - they're all fine for audio work. As Joe Meek said, if it sounds right, it IS right. And he was recording vocals on the staircase of his flat on the Holloway Road in London. As for the new high-speed FireWire, talking to a friend who works on a Mac magazine here in the UK, he's not heard about any new products featuring 1394b due for release in the next few months. So if you need a FireWire drive now, you might as well get one rather than hang about waiting. Current FireWire speeds are still pretty nippy.
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lun. 2 déc. 2002, 12:31
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Pardon the warming-up of leftovers from the back of the fridge, fellas -- looks like this topic's been dormant for a couple months. I thought it might be nice, though, in my first post here to share some (hopefully) useful information I've found, and possibly get an answer to my question. I couldn't find any recent updated thorough info on this as of last week, so I did a little digging myself.
Of the pros I spoke with who are currently either using or building their Mac-based digital home studios, most are saying the same things, which are as follows.
First off, FireWire external drives are the most popular choice. They're easy to implement, cheap, fast, and reliable.
Two main components are to be considered in the process of shopping for an external FireWire drive: The IDE drive itself, and the "box" within which it resides.
The drive's size is somewhat important-- those that have a 40GB or smaller all say they wish they'd paid the extra cash for an 80GB; those with 80GB or higher are happy. The drive's SPEED is more important-- all recommend 7200rpm drives. Also, if you can get it already formatted for Mac, that's even better, as the formatting process can be a bit weird over FireWire...? I don't know enough about this. More digging for another future post, perhaps.
Now for the box-- the most important features (in order) are the chipset, case material, and items inside the case other than the chipset and drive. Consistently the Oxford 911 chipset was recommended. Aluminum is the case material of choice because of its heat-dissipating qualities. And fans, even "quiet" ones, are generally avoided (and not really needed with aluminum cases anyway). Also, if you can get a case with an external power supply, this reduces the heat in the case even more (though it might add another "wall wart" AC Power Adaptor to your setup-- blechh!!).
With that in mind... You can buy an ideal drive (80GB, 7200RPM) for well under $100 US dollars, and a good case (Oxford 911 chipset, aluminum case, no fan, external power supply) for around $50 through the right auction.
One thing I didn't even think to ask of the people I spoke to (and they didn't mention it, so maybe it's not a big deal?) was the cache size -- 2MB is common, 8MB is possible but not as readily available. ANYONE, do you know if this is a concern?
FYI www.eshop.macsales.com has a pretty decent deal going right now-- one of their setups is for a 100GB drive with the 8MB cache and all the other good things mentioned above, plus a 2yr warranty, for around $275. Still think dropping $400 on a comparable Glyph drive is worth it?
Cheers, all -- and if you find out about that whole cache conundrum, fill me in, k?
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mar. 3 déc. 2002, 01:22
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If I've posted this before, it bears repeating. My experience with the OWC Mercury Elite series has been excellent, and I recommend that anyone shopping for an external firewire drive at least take a look at these in yer comparison shopping: http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Page.cfm...e=FW&Template=1The Elite cases are pretty handsome, too, housed in clear plastic, ala G4s, with a smart blue power light that can double as a nightlight.  The pictures on the page don't do it justice. It's also quiet. OWC sells the parts for rolling your own external firewire drive if you prefer to go that route, but with the Elites, they've done the work. Worth a look.
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mer. 4 déc. 2002, 17:26
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Hmmm...I know this is an old thread, but I must say it does tickle me to read that some mac musicians had been wondering why they had problems recording/playing back audio when they had been using their internal BOOT drive as their AUDIO drive.... The mac is continuously accessing the system drive for system related read/write to/from memory instructions, and I feel that it ought to be common knowledge that it is definitely not the place to be recording/playing back audio from/to!! It's no wonder users get 'interruptions' in their recordings...the system drive is already busy dealing with the...er...SYSTEM! I have always had a separate drive for audio...even back in 1996 when drives were not that fast (the problems even more obvious back then.) I can see it now...the audio drive is completely "free from traffic" on it's I/O ribbon cable, whereas there is always a stream of data moving up & down the system drive's I/O ribbon cable..er...ho hum
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