Best drive subsystem for sampler audio?

[Allan Speers]

I am looking to upgrade my sampler drive system. Using a Mac G5, but I keep my drives external so the Mac's loud fan doesn't constantly kick on.

This will be for various VI's, such as Ivory, Kontakt II, Real Guitar, etc. -All VI's that do heavy disk streaming.

It is reasonable to assume that the faster the samples can stream off of the drives, the less burden their will be on the cpu and/or bus controller. So, I want a system that is more than "just fast enough." I am currently using three FW800 drives. One is dedicated to Ivory, one to Kontakt, and one to the rest of my VI libraries such as Battery, Real Guitar, etc.

Regardless, If I should upgrade to a Mac Pro, I may be able to run significantly more instances of Kontakt at once time, and thus disk demands will be much greater. I would rather not break-up my Kontakt libraries onto separate drives, since there's no way of knowing which sounds might be combined in any one session. I'd rather just have a bloody fast single drive and not have to worry about it.

Perhaps I could even set-up a raid system? Does anyone know if this will work with Protools? Raid is verbotten for the boot drive & for session audio, but what about for sampler audio? If raid DOES work, then am I better off with FW800 or eSATA?

Ughhh.
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Final thought: Am I worrying over nothing? Would one 7200 rpm FW800 drive actualy be enough for all my libraries at once? Again, how would you acertain this? How could you tell that a faster drive wouldn't lower the cpu burden, even if the slower drive technically worked?

Anyone out there running heavy VI's, I sure would love to get some benchmarks, and hear about your specific systems & VI performance.

[Allan Speers]

Bump.

Why do the Digi techs not have an answer for this? I find that incredible.

[Allan Speers]

Post deleted by Allan Speers

[Allan Speers]

Ask a tough question ......

sigh.

[Craig F]

eSATA has much better throughput that FW800

[stevegalante]

Allan I've been looking for "definitive" answers on this point for years unsuccessfully... All I know is my audio has always been great running from/to SCSI drives, so my next move, together with new generation SCSI drives for audio (the new Cheetah 300G 15k for example), would be to try to use SCSI drives for VI too. At the moment I'm using a Mercury Elite 1.6T FW 800 drive for my libraries, and yes, sometimes it's not fast enough.

[Allan Speers]

Steve, I hear you. I've been using SCSI for my aduio for years - just kind of expensive for sampler audio.

Anyway, SAS is about to make Scsi a dinosaur, so I'm not putting any more money there. SAS is amazing. The raw throughput of a single drive is around 30% better than the best scsi, AND it has the queing advantages of SATA. You can actually get real-world throughput of 200 MB/s from a single drive. SAS is just gonna' take over, and fast.

Raid is out, BTW. I found out lots of info recently, but the bottom line (even if PT recognized the drive, which is actually likely) is that even the best raid-zero arrays introduce some latency. Kinda' rules it out for VI libraries.

I'm starting to think I was WAAAAAY too anal about this. A single SATA drive will probably suffice for my needs, with maybe one dedicated FW drive added for Ivory. I was hung-up on the idea that a faster drive will lessen cpu burden, since the samples won't be streaming as much. This is definitely true, but man, how hard can you keep pushing these things? I gotta' get back to work! When I have the cash, I'll change all VI stuff to a second SAS bus. That will be living.
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Craig, the difference between FW400 & eSATA isn't as great as many sites imply. There's a TON of mis-information out there. If you are talking about throughput of a single drive (internal transfer rate) then you're talking aproximately 60-70 MB/s for a good ATA vs 80 MB/s for the best SATA II. -not a lot of difference. However, an ATA drive (doesn't matter if it's internal, in a FW400 enclosure, or a FW800 enclosure) cannot do command queing, so under heavy use with multiple files streaming at once, the eSATA does have a serious advantage. (it's just not due to raw throughput) Also, the SATA drive demands less from the CPU.