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#1
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Why 2 dedicated disk drives?
Hey,all- been awhile since I was on DUC last, and I see the DUC look has changed considerably. Looks good. Just got my PTMP installed, and I see from the Pro Tools literature that all recording should be done to a dedicated drive for audio only. Makes sense, and I was planning to get an external Firewire drive anyway. The question is how big? I plan to do 24 bit,96 khz sessions. If I have 16 or so tracks, and 15 minute songs( they might be that long), well the math indicates 80 GB would hold about 20 songs. But here is my question.The Pro Tools website page "hard drive requirements" says "full 32 track, 24 bit, 96 khz performance from two dedicated IDE/ATA or SATA audio drives is supported". The same track count at 48 khz requires just one drive. Is there some reason I'm unaware of that two drives would be necessary or better for 96 khz? And if so, can these two drives be daisychained? Does 96 khz actually need two drives? Or would one drive be sufficient if it's large enough, in my case, 80 GB? I could easily enough, get a 320 GB drive,just in case-but would I need another drive for some reason? I am hoping more experienced people could shed some light on this. Thanks.
iMac,2.66 Ghz core 2 duo processor, 2 GB ram,OS: 10.5.4 PT M-powered, version 7.4 (I plan to download 7.4.2) M-audio Fast Track Ultra interface |
#2
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Streaming lots of large files requires some serious disk performance.
Notice that they don't mention FireWire there. That's likely because the bus itself isn't capable of handling that much data especially if you're using a FW based interface. It's just too large a volume of "water" to go through the "pipe". Since you don't have PCI as an option for additional storage I wouldn't count on being able to do large track counts at high sample rates. As for how many tracks you can actually get you'll just have to do some testing. Never hurts to have a few extra drives handy anyway. |
#3
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Thanks for the reply. But I still have a question-if I use 2 drives,as Digidesign recommends, how are they configured? A simple daisychain, or do they have to be in parallel? Also, if it's a Firewire 800 drive, would it not be able to handle massive files? I am new to Firewire and only know what I read about it, but it seems to me that 800 Mbs is plenty fast enough, but maybe there is an aspect to this that I am unaware of? Any info or informed opinions would be appreciated.
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#4
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I could be wrong on this, but I believe the iMac only has one FW bus anyway so I guess it wouldn't matter if they were daisy chained or not.
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#5
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That could be,I'm not sure-my iMac has two FW ports,one for FW400 and one for FW800. I do not know enough about Firewire ports to know if they could be fed by a single bus. Anyone know this?
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#6
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I'm not sure about the bus architecture of the newer iMacs, but since they are consumer-oriented Macs I wouldn't be surprised if the FW ports share an internal bus.
This page has guidelines, and a track count chart toward the bottom. This info seems a bit outdated though, and remember that if you're using FW for your I/O that's gonna eat up some bandwidth on the bus. |
#7
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Quote:
You are stuck with the iMac. On all of my systems I have a second FW card (MBPro and G5) that guarantees the interface is always separate from the drive chain.
__________________
Eric Seaberg • San Diego, CA A.E.S., I.E.E.E., S.M.P.T.E., S.P.A.R.S. |
#8
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Quote:
Second, I use the same interface (Fast Track Ultra), and record to an external Firewire drive. I haven't had any issues with it. The FTU is USB2, and I don't think they fight for the bus. I think they would recommend 2 drives because 96Khz 24bit audio is quite a bit larger than 44/24 bit. Actually having one hard drive be able to seek and read 30 something tracks would be asking a lot. Two drives would make it doable. Or perhaps RAID-0ing them would be good too. Also, you should keep a partition on the hard drive just for recording. And you might want to get some sort of disk defragmenting utility as well. |
#9
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No. A striped RAID actually increases seek times which will decrease performance with a large track/edit count. Better to use JBOD, and split the tracks between drives.
Not to mention the fact that a striped RAID is a dangerous place to keep essential data. |
#10
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Re: Why 2 dedicated disk drives?
ProTools, in general, WILL NOT WORK with RAID drives, unless it's a HARDWARE configured RAID, as is the case with some of the OWC cases. ProTools sees it as a single device, even though you may have two drives striped.
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Eric Seaberg • San Diego, CA A.E.S., I.E.E.E., S.M.P.T.E., S.P.A.R.S. |
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