Firewire Harddrives Options

[Schack]

Greetings from Copenhagen!

I'm about to buy a Tibook 800 and a MOTU 828. I'm also thinking about getting a firewire harddrive, but can you record directly onto this or should it only be used for backup purposes?
Also, can any of you recommend a harddrive? I know of the M-Project from Glyph, but are there others?

Thanks,
Schack

PS. Check out my songs at: http://www.koncertnet.dk/cgi-bin/db/db.cgi...target=bigframe

Choose "hoj" for high bandwith connect and "lav" for low bandwith connect.

[add9]

Greetings Schack from Norway

I have MOTU 828 and need more space on my G4 733, so I ordered today a 60 gig Icecube. I will move Logic and all my sounds and songs over to it, and then I can easily take it with me when I am traveling
I will recommend you to buy an Icecube too. It comes in "all" sizes, and 60 gig is the smallest.




Rebecca

[lepetitmartien]

Greetings from Paris, France

Technically wise the most important thing to check are:

- oxford 911 (controler chip, fastest at the time)
- 7200rpm
- THAT (censored) FAN!

The firewire enclosures I have which are neither oxford nor fanless and make a noise you can mix with G4s

Not important for the use I have, but noisy yes.

Be shure to have a look on that!

[lepetitmartien]

Just a quick word (got to go to sleeeeeep) to add:

There's a thread in the french forum running upon the audible differences you CAN hear between and IDE/SCSI/firewire drive.

The inherent specs of fireqire cause jitter in the audio signal as each chip controling a firewire port has a quartz running asynchronously sausing jitter in the samples…

The quality won't be then as top as it could be on IDE or SCSI.

For the ones who read french: (beware top pro meeting

http://www.macmusic.org/agora/forums/?lang...=21&t=2414&st=0

[Synthetic]

there is a fix for that firewire issue mentioned above... when I bought my glyph drive... it came with a new firewire PCI card that solves that issue. I was told that problem was mainly only apparent on the older firewire equipped computers such as my G3 blue and white but has since been solved with newer firewire technology.

Anyway, I use Glyph 30Gig drive and love it. Had for over a year and never had one bit of trouble with it and recordings sound fine when used in combination with my Digi001 and ProTools LE. Plus its rack-mountable which is nice and I have it mounted in a rack under my workstation along with my Digi001.

[lepetitmartien]

The pros in question are a bit wary on that… the issue as far as they know has not been addressed, because the firewire standard is asynchronous in essence. Ever wonderd why MOTU made a firewire system not firewire compatible (2408 family) but to propose sample level accuracy

The last post on that said that on a normal project it shouldn't be a problem, as the bandwith is laaarge. But on very big p^rojects it can be an issue.

At the time Digi is counselling implicitly to work in SCSI and back up in firewire (a guy in the french part found the between the lines from Digi)

But, if it sounds right… you know the ad!

[Synthetic]

this could be true as I rarely have more than 20 tracks per session in 24bit... it may just depend on the load you demand from your drives

[Synthetik]

I really like the Lacie Drives,

They are a little higher price but they a wonderful, quite, and reliable.

Plus they look really cool

Oh and stackable.

The gloyh drives are nice but the price n them is stupid. A 40gb is the price of 2 120gb lacie drives.

[damann]

people seem to be missing the point a bit here!
i use an 80gb ice warrior with an 828 on my tibook, no problems.
no fan on the ice warrior either.
but the point is...
apart from the bus issue, it dosen't really matter who the vendor is, what's much more important is the drive inside the box.
i paid a little extra to have a seagate barracuda inside the ice.
since using g4 technology, i've already had a couple of ide drives die on me(they're just not as reliable as scsi drives), in my experience, barracudas are the most reliable drives on the market.
all video and audio pros use them.
so what's inside the glyph?
what's inside the lacie?
probably a cheap western digital or maxtor, be careful.

[burns]

Hi all

I'm using 2 120 Giga ICE (Firewire) no extra fan.
It runs on G4 533 and MIX 3.
No problems with 64 tracks on 2 disks and 32 on one disk.
This system is on since 4 months.....I sold my SCSI CARD.

[damann]

dodgydesign still want you to use scsi, what the f..k is all that about?
who'se going to buy a NEW computer with scsi hard drives?
they seem to consider themselves illusionists, they're not fooling anybody with a free mind...
so, the "world leaders in PRO digital audio" release a usb? drive/audio interface as their standard "introduction" point?
for anyone "pc" reading here, i'm talking about a usb1 solution here! believe it or not...
firewire is truly great!

[Synthetik]

Damann,
A few days ago I emailed Lacie, I was suprised that they got back to me that same day. But any how the 40, 60,and 80Gig Firewire HDs are Seagate. The 120 and 160 Gig are Maxtor.

[damann]

thanks for that info synthetik.
it dosen't surprise me that lacie(the most expensive vendors) have the integrity to use seagate.
if you're wondering why they use maxtor for the larger drives, it's simple...
seagate don't currently offer drives of that capacity!
there are some "fudges" involved in making drives of such a capacity at the moment, and i suspect seagate aren't prepared to play ball here YET.
now, all you have to do is compare prices between lacie and boxclever.
well, ok, also the visual appeal(boxclever win) and the build.
i'll have to call that one "even"...

[azusa]

Has anybody use a Firewire drive as your main drive for audio?

I bought an OWC Mercury Ellite 7200 rpm with a Sonnet Tango card. I can get up to 36 MB of reading speed.
But the audio keeps dropping off and the sound is very thin ( compare to my other SCSII 2 drive.)
Now it's relegated to a back up duty.

[Synthetik]

I just bought an 80gig, right now I have a 36 gig internal SCSI, I was planning on switching the audio drive to the firewire and leaving the SCSI for Graphics.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

[DANO10]

I'm using a Glyph 80 Gig Firewire and a MOTU 828. with DP3 and, so far (about a month), Ive had no trouble at all.

DANO10