TO ALL NEW HD OWNERS

[acesfull]

If you were building your system from scratch, and were getting HD3, what would you get for hard drives, and backup??

[George Cumbee]

R:

I haven't had any experience with firewire drives, but have heard mixed reports. I think I would stick with UW scsi. I am sure there are those who will disagree, but we have had good luck with them. Especially if you get into a lot of tracks. I don't know how well fw handles that. SCSI drives have gotten much cheaper so it is not as bad as when I jumped in. I have been buying 18g 10Krpm drives for RADAR recently for just over $200. That is just the drive. I get carriers for RADAR. We have a Glyph Trip rack with two bays that I can use them in there if need be, then I have another Glyph fixed rack with 2 9gs. We hookup clients external drives to our SCSI 3 cables when they bring them in.

As for backup, we have used AIT for almost 3 years now with very good results. We use Mezzo and Retrospect. I prefer Mezzo, but that is another thread. It has been good for us. I did some experiemting the other day with an Exabyte drive from my RADAR. I have 2 external Exabytes, since we have DVDRam internal on RADAR. I hooked one of them to the PT rig. It worked fine. Tapes are cheap. Storage is less(7g vs 25g) than AIT, but AIT tapes are $65 and Exabytes are less than $10. AIT is about 3 times faster I think. I think AIT 1 is 180m/min vs 60m/min on Exabyte.

Hope that helps some

[Lee Blaske]

I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting discussion on this in the coming months. Also, keep in mind that Digidesign hasn't finished testing FireWire yet. I'd also expect that Digi might be qualifying a more recently designed SCSI card in the near future.

Personally, I treat drives like a commodity. Buying good drives at a good price is no longer a high anxiety situation the way it was when hard drives were relatively new, undependable, and cost an arm and a leg.

Just as you don't buy all the gas you'll ever use when you buy a car, you don't need to buy all the hard drive space you'll ever need when you buy a new HD system. Let your needs dictate what you buy. Remember, there are a lot of fine eTailers out there that can have another huge drive (at a very good price) on your door step tomorrow morning via Fedex.

Definitely, when you get your G4, stick in a second, fast, high capacity IDE drive. An IBM 120GXP (which comes in two sizes - 80 & 120 GB) would be a good choice. The 80 GB version costs $185.

A good place to shop for raw drives is www.newegg.com (they've also got great prices on F&W Seagate Cheetahs). Also investigate sites like www.deal-mac.com. A good place to check out the reliability and user opinions on drives is www.cnet.com (just type in the model number or series of the drive you're contemplating purchasing). Granite Digital (www.granitedigital.com) is a great place to buy enclosures and connecting cables for the raw drives you buy from newegg (or other retailers).

Don't let the high pressure sales tactics of some dealers pressure you into sinking a lot of money into drives sold by companies like Glyph, etc. If you do go with a product from such a company, make sure you're getting service(s) you *really* need. In a lot of cases, you could buy two drives (and have a spare on the shelf) for what you might pay the high service, high fear factor sellers. Getting a drive to function well does not take the rocket science it took a few years ago (especially with support forums like this one).

Generally, the high priced specialty companies might be a place to turn to if you have some highly specialized need (for instance, a large SCSI network in a major facility with many PT workstations).

Other features you'll have to evaluate considering your situation. For instance, the DigiDrives (from Digidesign) are reputed to be very quiet. If your computer components are in a machine room (a very good idea), this may not be important. OTOH, lots of drives currently being manufactured are very quiet.

My advice is to buy high quality components at discount prices (the Seagate drive in a Glyph enclosure is the same as one you'd buy from a place like Newegg), and to have enough redundancy so that you can keep going in the unlikely event that something fails. These days, warranty claims are handled in a fairly efficient manner by the drive mechanism manufacturers (Seagate, IBM, Western Digital, etc.).

The Digidesign compatibility documents have some preliminary specs regarding how many drives you need for certain performance.

Personally, I've found Digi's recommendations to be quite conservative. With my PT|Mix 3 system, I'm able to get 64 tracks of 44.1/48k and video playback dependably off of an internal IBM 120GXP IDE drive (although I should qualify this by saying that I don't hack all my tracks into microscopic regions and slide them around).

Remember, you can always buy more (and the longer you wait, the cheaper it'll be).

Lee Blaske

[KamaSutra77]

This is one of those, "crack a book" threads. I'd sugges using all zip drives and gateway pc's. With a sneakernet back up system to floppy disc.

[usinare]

i have been using ibm ide drives with no problems both for audio and video production.

[actualsizeaudio]

These are all good ideas. I have a guy that is local for me that hooked me up with a very reasonable drive enclosure system. The Data Express series is very similar, if not exactly the same as the glyph series. My contact (Walter at impediment in Boston 781-834-3800) sends me seagate or quantum drives pre-installed in removeable enclosures. I highly reccomend these, it is great to be able to keep drives out of the way, and to be able to easily transport them to another studio. I feel like the fewer drives hooked up, the safer you are to not accidentally put something where it doesn't belong. As far as the new sampling rates, Where I used 18gig drives in the past, you might want to use 36gig drives. As far as backups are concerned, I use VXA tape from ecrix. It works well now (buggy at first), and is an easy way to keep things backed up.

Mike

[BradLyons]

If you want to get into 192kHz recording, you'll need 15k drives and plenty of them!