eSata Expresscard/34 for Glyph Drive

[tempesax]

I have an older MacBook Pro, the one with FW 400, FW 800, and ExpressCard/34 slot.

I have been running PT LE with my Digi 003 running on the FW 400 port and my Gyph HDD on the FW 800 port.

I recently bought PT 9 and a Metric Halo ULN-8 FW interface. Metric Halo advises me to allocate the entire internal FW bus to the ULN-8 which means I need to run the Glyph HDD on some ExpressCard on the ExpressCard slot.

I could use either a FW 800 card or an eSata card. I am leaning towards an eSata card as eSata is faster than FW 800 and I am interested in experimenting with recording at faster sample rated (176.4 kHz) and say 16 tracks (will require second ULN-8.)

Does anyone have any experience with ExpressCard eSata cards connected to Glyph drives?

Thanks,

Mark

[Park Seward]

I use an express card in my MacBookPro. It is a FW800 card interface and works fine with any drive I've tried.

[cshaw]

Go with eSATA. You'll feel like you have a newer, faster machine.

I use a Rosewill dual port eSATA ExpressCard that I bought at New Egg connected to a StarTech dual slot eSATA/USB hard hard drive dock. The whole setup cost about $80 and is by far the best upgrade I've made to my laptop rig (a 2006 15" MBP C2D /PT9/ FW410 interface). It's incredibly fast and you'll never want to use FW for you audio files again. My FW ports are only used for my interfaces. I've been able to do some pretty dense 88.1/96k mixes with it. You'll also be able to use a lower DAE Playback buffer.

I've used it with Glyph drives without any problems. (To be honest, almost every time I've had hard drive problems, on my rig and others, a Glyph drive was the culprit. Your milage may vary.)

I highly recommend using a hard drive dock. It allows you to use raw hard drives which are much, much cheaper. You can get a 1TB drive for around $80 and if you go with the dual port option then backups are incredibly fast. Switching hard drives is a breeze and you don't have to mess with power and FW cables. Just slap the drive into the dock. Another plus is that you need much less space to store your drives. I use a P-Touch to label the side of the drive and keep them in a old CD storage tower I have. As a precaution, I tape an index card over the bottom of the drive to prevent my fingers and dust from getting at the exposed circuit board.

If your rig is used for mobile recording then a HD dock may be very impractical for you.


Things you may want to consider before buying the ExpressCard:

- The less expensive ones like the Rosewill will not allow you to boot from the drive attached to the card. I back up my system drive to the eSATA dock and if i need to boot from it I put the drive in a spare FW800 enclosure I have lying around.

- Check to see what driver the card uses. The Rosewill card I have uses the Silicon Image driver which has been very stable and they've been keeping it updated along with OSX.

Hope this helps.

[tempesax]

CSHAW:

Thank you for your post. This helps me a lot. I could go either way with my Glyph drive (FW 800 or eSata). Your post confirms that it is better to go eSata.

I have been using my Glyph drive for the last 2 years with no problem on the FS800 internal port and a Digi 003 on the FW 400 internal port. Recording at 44.1 kHz.

Now I am switching to Metric Halo ULN-8 on the FW 400 internal port and Glyph on an eSata ExpressCard/34. I will keep an eye on the Glyph drive to see if it starts giving me problems at faster sampling rates.

I will also consider upgrading to the rig you are describing.

Mark