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Old 04-11-2005, 08:34 AM
Sui_City Sui_City is offline
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Default SCSI or Firewire on Mix?

Hi All.

We are running a Mix Core System with a G4.

We want to know if there are any issues with going from SCSI to Firewire. SCSI drives and cards are really expensive to replace, so the thought of moving to newer cheaper technology is appealing.

Are there any pitfalls?

Thanks in advance
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Old 04-11-2005, 09:01 AM
Monte McGuire Monte McGuire is offline
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Default Re: SCSI or Firewire on Mix?

I haven't found FW to be very reliable or fast, especially on older machines or OSes. I've had instances of data corruption and other related errors that sometimes were not reported, other times they cause the machine to hang. Most of the time, a day's work will pay for a SCSI drive, so the "make good" cost to me for a failure on the clock is high enough to make SCSI still significantly cheaper than FireWire.

FW is a pleasant nearline backup medium due to its speed, but I still have to verify every copy and sometimes I run into issues. I find the OWC fanless drive cases to be pretty flaky - this may be my main problem, but it's happened to me with several units. Maybe you know of non flaky FW drives, but I really have never seen them.

If you want to save money and slots, a better way to go would be to use internal IDE drives for recording and external FW drives for backup and session transport. That way, if you run into a problem, you can alway re-run the copy until it works right - there's no chance of losing real time data or having errors that bring down the machine. IDE is cheaper and more reliable, since that's what's underneath a FW drive anyway - strip off the slow and unreliable FW layer and you win big IMHO.

Still, I like SCSI and see no reason to abandon it yet. YMMV!

-monte-
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Old 04-11-2005, 11:41 AM
kinghand kinghand is offline
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Default Re: SCSI or Firewire on Mix?

If you don't record waves that using higher sample rate than 48k, firewire disk is enough
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Old 04-11-2005, 12:00 PM
PMoshay PMoshay is offline
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Default Re: SCSI or Firewire on Mix?

Firewire drives with Oxford chipsets (formatted correctly) will work fine up to 48k just fine.
i have Lacie D2 Extreme drives........64 tracks with lots of edits works fine for me (your mileage may vary).
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Old 04-11-2005, 12:54 PM
Lee Blaske Lee Blaske is offline
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Default Re: SCSI or Firewire on Mix?

Back when I was using a Mix system, switching to FW greatly improved my operation, and completely took care of all the nagging -6042 issues that I had.

The PCI bus buffering on Mix cards was not great, and under numerous situations, the Mix card could end up being starved for data, generating the dreaded -6042 "PCI bus too busy" error message. The chance for this error increased with different factors, which included using an expansion chassis, running video, more powerful display cards, two displays, running a different application (like Logic) as a PT front end, and a PCI SCSI card.

The huge advantage of FireWire drives in this situation is that FireWire does not put additional strain on the PCI bus. So, if you were on the edge of having PCI bus problems with a SCSI PCI card, switching to FW would solve your problems.

These days, FW is quite mature. Two FW drives for a 64 track Mix system would work wonderfully. Personally, if I were buying drives today, I'd get Seagate 7200.8 IDE drives to load into either Granite Digital or StoreCase enclosures.

In my opinion, quality FW drives are definitely the way to go with Mix hardware. In my working situation, it was a real relief to get rid of SCSI and all the -6042 errors.

Lee Blaske
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