FW 400 or FW 800?

[Accel]

Is there any advantage in using FW 800 over FW 400 with Pro Tools (and difference for MIx / HD)? I know that the actual drive is the limitation, but what if I'm using more than one external FW drive, would FW 800 buss be able to accept more external drives? Digidesign limits the maximum number of external FW 400 drives to 2 for Mix and 4 for HD systems. Why the difference, isn't it the same buss and why only 2/4 drives, cant more than 2/4 be used?

Thanks, MO

[Avid]

No advantage currently with FW 800 drives, and we've only qualified one FW 800 drive, the EZ Quest used as the only drive on the FW 800 port. No daisy-chaining of FW 800 drives.

8 FireWire 400 drives for up to 192 tracks have been qualified with Pro Tools|HD Accel systems.

Details on both of the above here:
http://www.digidesign.com/compato/osx/hd/drives.cfm

I'm no tech, so I can only take a guess at the MIX vs. HD question...
I believe (especially on newer computers) that HD cards work more efficiently than MIX cards on the PCI bus, which might explain the difference in how many extra drives you can use with each. I think that PCI traffic can still have an effect on Firewire performance even though they are different types of busses.

[surroundguy]

Just remember not to mix FW400 and 800 on the G5 - there is a thread on it somewhere here.

[Accel]

8 FireWire 400 drives for up to 192 tracks have been qualified with Pro Tools|HD Accel systems.

Details on both of the above here:
http://www.digidesign.com/compato/osx/hd/drives.cfm

Now, that's strange, because if you go to:

http://www.digidesign.com/compato/osx/stg/firewire.cfm

"Firewire Hard Drives with Pro Tools"

under

General Technical Specifications

Performance Expectations

you'll find:

* Maximum 2 drives for a total of 48 tracks (Pro Tools|24 MIX systems)
* Maximum 4 drives for a total of 96 tracks at 48 KHz/24-bit (Pro Tools|HD systems)
* Digidesign has qualified configurations containing a maximum of four DigiDrive FireWire drives daisy-chained to a Pro Tools workstation using Digidesign supplied cables. (more than 4 drives may result in -6042 errors on all systems)

As you can see, two pages on Digidesign's site tell two different things, so which one is correct?

I'm still using Mix systems on a Mac G4 / OS 9.2.2 and would like to know the maximum number of FW400 drives that I can use with that system.
I guess that others would be interested to know the maximum number of FW400 drives that I can be used with an HD (Accel) system.

Thanks, MO

[Will Russell]

Hi,

According to the page that the Digi administrator refered to there actually is an advantage to the FW800 as it supports more tracks than FW400.

[Allan Speers]

Right. Why would the Digi Web Administrator state "No advantage currently with FW 800 drives" when the page he gave us the ulr for clearly DOES show higher track counts with FW 800?

Well, regardless, FW800 is now the standard, and is cheap enough. the only possible reason I can think of to consider FW400 is if you already have a few, and want to use multiple drives for a session. As you can't mix FW 400 and 800 on one session, you would be stuck.

Also, someone someday has to explain to me why Digi's official track-count estimates are always so unbelievabley, innacurately low. Being conservative is a good thing, but c'mon! They say 16 tracks max @ 96K on a scsi drive, but I can EASILY get 64 with tons of edits. Same deal with their FW estimates.

I WOULD love to know the current "real world" track counts people are getting on FW800.

[lagasus]

Hi,

According to the page that the Digi administrator refered to there actually is an advantage to the FW800 as it supports more tracks than FW400.

That is true if you are using only one drive. But if you need more tracks than one FireWire 800 drive can supply, you are out of luck because Digidesign does not support daisy-chaining multiple FireWire 800 drives.