Optimum Hard Drive Setups

[bootc]

Hi All,
Can anyone tell me what the best hard drive setup is for PT LE?
I've seen the speeds for SATA and they blow even FW 800 away! Is this best and can you even get a SATA external HD?
Also, can I safely setup a RAID 0 without compromising speed or stability?
Is it ok to have Audio Projects Folder setup on the same drive as OS?
Cheers, Simon.

[The Dougfather]

This depends on what Mac you have, ultimately if you have a Mac pro loaded with Sata's or even the new SAS drives then it's guns blazing. If however your a mere mortal like me with a lower grade mac then the safest, tried and tested method is a FW400 external hard drive which has an Oxford 911 chipset (OWC computing are great). Pro Tools does not support raid, e-sata or FW800.

Audio files should always be kept off of the system drive for optimum performance, using the system drive is waste of time and sanity.

Cheers

[Paul David]

FWIW, I'm using the Glyph GT050Q which has a reputation for being one of the better audio drives and it's pretty solid. It chokes up a little with around 80 tracks* at 48K but other than that it's been great.

I'm using the FW 800 port because my iMac only has one FW400 port which I use for my 003


*I'm using the MP toolkit and dragging a lot of mono vocals and guitars to stereo tracks to free up voices.

[bootc]

Thanks guys,
Yeah, we have a iMac 2.16 with 2GB RAM running audio off a Lacie 350GB USB 2.
I think it's the Lacie that's slowing things down where we occasionally get the 'buffer underrun' error when tracking, monitoring postfade (for monitoring plugs).
Would at least a FW400 sort this out?
Cheers, Simon

[Patrick']

Thanks guys,
Yeah, we have a iMac 2.16 with 2GB RAM running audio off a Lacie 350GB USB 2.
I think it's the Lacie that's slowing things down where we occasionally get the 'buffer underrun' error when tracking, monitoring postfade (for monitoring plugs).
Would at least a FW400 sort this out?
Cheers, Simon

ohhh yeah I can tell you from experience that 2days ago that since I've switch my hd's from their usb ext cases to some compusa branded fw400 [bleep] has been super damn smooth. no more freezing nd waiting 2 to 5 minutes for protools to return to its normal state.

[M.Brane]

Well since you have an iMac you can't use 'em, but yes there are external SATA drives.

As you have found out USB sucks for serious storage. Too slow, and too much CPU overhead compared to even FW400.

The problem with mirrored RAID is any problem is immediately copied to the mirrored drive so not much good as a backup. The only thing it protects you against is a drive failure. With an iMac I wouldn't even consider a RAID setup especially for audio work. Not worth the hassle.

[cp2]

Hi;

Wondering if anybody here can answer my firewire question. I just bought a LaCie 500GB FW for backup storage and I'm in the process of transfering my PT sessions from my 'work drive' to the LaCie. Everything seems to transfer fine from one drive to the other (sessions open and sound the same) however when I 'apple I' the folders, the GB comparisons are very different while the bytes remain the same. One folder was 25GB's on one drive, then came up as 18GB's when I transferred to the LaCie, but the bytes were nearly identical. What's going on here?

Thanks!
cp2

[Doug Ring]

Fragmentation on the original drive?

[nhirst]

A related question.

I'm about to get an iMac 2.4Ghz and will be running PTLE on it. I currently use a Carillon FW400 drive for audio. Over the future I'll be wanting to use sampled drums (BFD) and probably sampled bass and piano - in addition to up to ten or twelve tracks of audio.

Question is: will the one audio drive be comfortable streaming samples and audio? FXpansion recommend a dedicated drive for BFD (ie not an audio drive). I'd rather not buy an extra drive unless it's necessary, but at the same time don't want to upgrade computers (from my current 1.67Ghz G4 Powerbook) only to have drives limit what I can do.

Whaddya reckon?

And apologies for the hijack...

[shanestt]

Nhirst-I have lots of experience w/BFD and you will definitely need a dedicated drive just for the samples. You will need to max out your RAM as well. If you want to use BFD w/protools you really have to follow the rules. BFD and protools are buggy just by themselves but together they can be a disaster sometimes, especially if not set up properly.