Firewire!: the good, the bad and the ugly

[blairl]

As a long time user of strictly SCSI hard drives, I am intruiged by the growing acceptance of Firewire drives. I have seen good and bad comments and would like to solicit more.

Are there any former SCSI users that are completely happy with firewire drives? How reliable are they? What kind of track counts are you getting? Is there much latency when starting record or playback? I want to know it all as I am considering purchasing quite a few Firewire drives. Thanks!

[rheudabaga]

mixed results. we use them a lot, mainly for sample archiving, mp3 library, and quicktime video playback, but one of our protools machines is successfully using the digi firewire drive for audio. they'll run fairly large mix sessions at 24 bit.

we did go through a period where some of the firewire ports on the macs were being blown. static? don't know, but we simply bought some firewire pci cards and we've been fine since then.

[Anibal]

Only using Firewire for the las 2 years, album projects, films, you name it, tons of tracks, edits, etc... never a nightmare situation like it used to be with SCSI. I'm not the only one...

[postboy]

I couldn't agree more! I first used the DigiFire drives during a very large LIVE recording session
where failure was absolutely NOT an option. The simplicty and ease of transport made this a very enjoyable process. After recording the gig, I had 3 days to turn around a mix, so, being able to bring the drives back to the studio and pluging in ONE cable made my life very good indeed!

Since then I haven't turned back.

Be careful what drives you get though, as they are NOT all equal. Main problems for me was Maxtor.

Western Digital ATA100 drives work great with an enclosure and Firewire bridge!'

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[tomhartman]

Using two 60g OWC Firewire drives on a Mix Plus system. This week doing a track with 62 tracks...not a hiccup. Got rid of my ATTO card months ago....

[l anthony johnson]

Since this topic seems to come up a lot, allow me to place into a thread my findings concerning FW. It is nothing that hasn't been discussed on the DUC before. It's just an opportunity to condense some useful information that hopefully makes it easier for someone in the future. These are my findings based on either what I've experienced or the majority of what I've learned from others' experiences. YMMV........but I doubt much...

1. If you're using any OS below OSX, replace or make sure you have FW extensions 2.8.4 or higher. Most commonly they can be found in OS 9.2.2.

2. Don't use third party software to format a FW drive. Just use erase disc from the main menu bar in the finder.

3. Don't drag the FW drive to the trash should you need to unmount it to disconnect the FW connection. Yes, FW is hot-swappable but before disconnecting use command-Y or "put away" under the file menu to avoid corrupting the drive.

4. Use any size drives but only ones that are 7200 RPM or better. Make sure the box has the Oxford 911 chipset. I 'believe' the max size for these boxes is 120 GB, but they perform much better for audio. As for fans on external boxes: I've seen about the same performance from boxes with fans as without. For every drive failure that was in a box with fan, I've heard of one in a box without. Probably safest to have a fan though, especially on larger drives that will have heavier usage.

5. If you have 'larger' sessions ( probably more than 32 voices, very heavy editing or large numbers of files on tracks) you may need to divide the tracks and track allocation in PT between multiple drives. And even though you probably have more than 1 FW connection on your computer, most users report better results daisy chaining the drives rather than attaching both straight to the computer.

One thing more; while some users prefer partioning their drives, I've never concluded any definative proof that it improves or harms the performance. Some users have very definate opinions on it both good and bad; things like causing the drive to search harder or more frequent, backing up and restoring being easier to manage, etc. Most of these seem to me to be simply the methods that users have gotten used to with SCSI or possibly just the way they're most comfortable working. Other than using third party software ( see #2 above) to create the partitioning, overall it just seems to be personal preference.

6. Sell those SCSI drives in a yard sell and never have to fool with ids and termination again!

anthony
z.a.t.s.

[audiobob]

I've been so satisfied with the OWC Mercury Elite, I bought one for my home Mbox system. Together with the simplicity of carrying a drive to work from home, or vice versa, and the compatibility of Pro Tools 5.1 (work) and PT 6 (home) my firewire experience has been nothing but positive. I've never been limited on tracks or had any slowdowns or problems associated with the firewire drive.

My DDS 3 Sony tape drive is the only SCSI device that's left, and as soon as I discover a SCSI to firewire adapter (if there is such a thing) or we end up getting new Macs and backup on DVD the Superdrive, SCSI will be gone forever from my computing experience. And that can't come soon enough for me.
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[dave-G]

I've got 5 OWC Mercury Elite 120's and one 180. I use them daily, I Fedex them across the country with merciless frequency, carry them with me on planes to sessions in distant locales, and otherwise put them through challenging life-experiences (for a hard drive). Knock on wood, they've been great. On the rare occasions where track counts are too high (50-60+tracks) they're cheap enough to mount up another and temporarily offload some audio files to another one. And I think I've only had to do that a couple of times.

If I were starting my collection of hard drives from scratch, I might look at the forthcoming Granite Digital rack-mounted "smart drive" system, since it still can get to be like pasta behind my drive shelves, with all the power lines, firewire cables, etc .... Equivalent performance (or not) aside, if you have lots of projects going and use lots of drives, the Granite sleds and enclosures are a very neat and tidy solution..

-dave

ps: I occasionally blow the dust off my Rorke UWSCSI Hot-Swap rack, just in case a project comes in a SCSI sled, but I haven't even powered this thing up for over a year.

[thomoose]

I agree with anthony, make sure you get drives with the Oxford chipset in. Otherwise PT may not play from the drive.

I was experimenting a while back and if I used a Formaac enclosure I have (which has a different chipset in), PT refused to let out a single peep - spewing DAE errors. The same drive in a different case worked a treat. This is with OS9, dont know about X.

I also had problems using multiple drives if one of them was the formac. Drives would randomly dissaprear. Had 6x250GB drives with Oxford chips all on the same buss the the other day with no troubles (in 10.2.6 though).

Weve had 50 tracks of 24/44.1 playing off a 120GB IBM with one project. I wouldnt trust IBM drives generally though, quite noisy and Ive had 4 fail. Ive got two seagates which are really quiet and had no probs yet (touch wood).

Depending on how hands on you are, in general, Ive had best results with drives formatted inside the mac and then put into a case. OS9 Disk Setup hasnt worked too well for me with Firewire drives. X seems better though.

just my 2p,
all the best,
Tom

[l anthony johnson]

Originally posted by blairl:

Right now with my 10,000 RPM SCSI drives, record and playback start and stop are instantaneous. I'm always zipping right along. It seems that I heard someone complaining at one time about firewire drives being a little less responsive in this respect. Nobody seems to be complaining about it here though. Does anyone have a problem with this?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">You'd think if anyone would feel a lag in response time it would be me on my old 9500 G3/300 with a FW card in a PCI slot. I haven't noticed any change at all from my old SCSI drives; except less problems. I've got 2 60 GB 7200 RPM FW boxes. One is Western Digital, the other is IBM.

anthony