Best drives to use on Mix system

[beaver803]

What is the best and fastest recording drives to use with my PT 6.4.1 Mix++ system. I have a dual 1.42 G4 running 10.3.8. I am now using two 36m 10k SCSI cheetahs. Can I use 15K 73m cheetahs or is there an even better alternative. Thanks!

[Craig F]

Ether should be fine but honestly I haven't used a SCSI drive in almost 10 years other than to copy off of.
Good Firewire drives should be fine with that machine

[beaver803]

Thanks for the reply. I am only using the SCSI drives because of thier fast seek times and drive speeds. I just didn't know if I could use faster and bigger drives since PT archives documents don't address anything after the cheetah 36m 10k scsi drives. Do you know if I can record to Firewire during a session! Thanks again.

[Craig F]

I have at 96k and that is when the cases had PATA drives, the new ones have SATA drives
The case needs an Oxford 911 or higher chip set ideally or get drives from a vender with a good reputation supporting the audio and film markets (OWC, Glyph, etc.)

[beaver803]

Thank you very much. I am definately going to look into that!

[davyjune87]

I use a Glyph firewire 120 GB on a similar setup , works great

[Protools Paul]

I use Samsung SSD Drive as system drive and record drive, so so fast.

[al-andrew]

Glyph all the way with Oxford chipset !!!!!!!

[JFreak]

Glyph is great, but whatever can be rack-mounted and has internal power supply, or external power supply with locking connector is fine. You don't want to have power problems with your session drive.

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by Protools Paul

I use Samsung SSD Drive as system drive and record drive, so so fast.

A modern Samsung SSD is complete overkill for a G4. For fun, I put an OCZ vertex (3-4 years old tech) in my G4 using an IDE-SATA adaptor, and it's pretty much the same performance as using a modern SATA drive. In either case, the bottleneck is the ATA-100 or ATA-66 connection and the painfully slow system bus (167Mhz if you have the fastest G4 made). A proper SATA PCI card might help, but I don't think it's necessary, a MIX system is limited to 64 voices @48k so unless it has trouble with that, there's not any advantage to faster drives.

I think a firewire enclosure with a modern 7200 RPM SATA drive inside, or an IDE-SATA adaptor to an internal SATA drive is all you'll ever need for a MIX system. Most modern drives are capable of around 150MB/s, which is 150% faster than FW800 or gigabit ethernet, and 300% faster than FW400. They'll be bottlenecked by the G4's architecture so there's not really any reason to go with an SSD or a loud 15000rpm SCSI drive.