"Can't get audio from the drive fast enough" -9073

[mingojr]

Originally Posted by Meads

Have you tested the speed of your FW-connection?
Download BlackMagic Disk Speed Test (it's free). Maybe there's something wrong with your port/cable. That way we can find out.

FW800 should give you 60-80 MB/s read and 40-60MB/s write speed.
Anything substantially lower than that points to an issue.

Just did the test, they are running fine.

[Darryl Ramm]

Anyhow back to what to do long term...

If this was my iMac or MacBook Pro with fairly limited internal expansion options and I wanted to run large >~ 100 track sessions etc. and run sample based VIs, especially demanding ones like Kontakt, and be 100% rock solid, then what I'd do is skip HDDs all together and go with SSD. And that also means getting off Firewire, its too slow for modern SSD drives. You might get stunning good performance from a single SSD but I would not risk it, and I'd not want to lock myself into having to daisy chain separate Thunderbolt hard drives. So I'd look for solutions that provided at least dual SSD drives.

As available small thunderbolt drives go the Lacie thunderbolt Little Big Drive seems fine, either with dual HDD (if you really want HDD, as long as you don't buy the 4,800rpm version) or SSD (but its an Intel SSD IIRC, not an SSD drive I really like, basically not a Samsung 840 Pro) they seem fine, folks are using them, and they are nice and compact (but sometimes noisy).

However a much better option in my view, especially if you don't need easy transportability, would be to get a Promise J4 Thunderbolt Drive enclosure (see http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...ure_Empty.html). And install as many Samsung 840 Pro SSD drives in that as you need. I'd start with two, and play with whether round robin audio/session files or putting sample on one or sessions on the other works best. Always use the as JBOD not RAID. Samsung also have new 840 Evo drives coming out with 1TB ~ $630 , these are TLC so maybe less long term life than the 840 Pro MLC, but with very similar performance. If you need now or in future a large sample drive say, the EVO is interesting, but I'd not rush to be the very first adopter (with any SSD drive). Basically you get a high performance SATA III enclosure you can mix and match stuff in without lots of cables.

The performance of this system with multiple 840 Pro drives will be stunningly fast, and it is a very significant price hike above this to get to higher performance IO, you'd be looking at PCIe flash in a Thunderbolt to PCIe enclosure at several times the cost.

[Eric Seaberg]

Originally Posted by Glenjb

Just wanted to throw out that I was having the same issue and realized my Firewire drive was 7200 rpm but it was a "green" drive. Bought a wd black and problem solved. Never had a 100 track session going on but 40 tracks yes which is happening

Green drives are NOT recommended. They have their own 'idea' of when to slow down and/or shut off. If you're going to use WD drives, spend the extra on Black Caviar.