Serial Card and Serial ATA...Good Idea or NoCigar

[fifty8th1]

Guys....

I may need to upgrade one of my internal harddisks... SO......

I am using a Dual 1 gig Mac. Anyone have thoughts on upgrading to a Serial Card and a Serial ATA hard disk ?

Thanks for anything..

Jon
58Th Street Studio

[doug_hti]

Guys....

I may need to upgrade one of my internal harddisks... SO......

I am using a Dual 1 gig Mac. Anyone have thoughts on upgrading to a Serial Card and a Serial ATA hard disk ?

Thanks for anything..

Jon
58Th Street Studio

Jon,

I started testing one yesterday for another studio. I put in a firmtek 2 channel external SATA card. The enclosure was also a firmtek 2 bay hot swap chasis.

I also had some Raptors and Seagates to choose drives from. I put in one raptor 74gig and one seagate 200gig. I copied over session files from a project that I was spanning 3 drives with. It has 84 (48k) tracks now.

I opened up the session on the Raptor alone...and I did not feel any sluggishness....only a slight pause (less than a second) before play...in which I've always gotten on every rig (be it firewire or SCSI)since OS X. It felt snappier than firewire. The only thing that caught my attention (which has been discussed) was the PCI meter was always up past 50% and spiking up to around 85%.

I then opened the same session on the Seagate. The performance felt the same as the Raptor. The PCI status looked a little bit lower...i don't know though. I was just suprised that it could hang as well.

I finally got PT to crash after starting and stopping as fast as I could and moving around in the edit window as fast as I could.

I will try spanning two drives soon....to see if the PCI business will go down by taking the load off of a single drive...or see what happens to stability.

Overall it feels good though. I haven't experienced anything as snappy as 5.3.1 though.
I had to record overdubs on another session last night, it had 45 tracks, so not quite the stress of the 84tracks, but it was solid.

I will also open a 64 track 96k session that i have archived somewhere to see what happens.

so far so good...as long as pci bus isn't an issue....

and i'm on a dual 1gig as well
6.7cs5
hd3(non-accel)

[bbob]

Hey Doug,
Man... if you don't mind, and have the time, can you keep posting about your Firmtek rig? I've been thinking about using that system when I upgrade to a G5 and would like to hear more about how it's working for you.
Thanks, Brent

[fifty8th1]

There was not much interest regarding this thread..... so ... I take it there are not many switching to serial card and serial harddisk.

Jon

[doug_hti]

a bit of an update....I haven't had time to reopen the 96k 64track session...however, I had to do more bgv overdubs (tons of start/stops/punches)...and it was rock solid over 80 tracks. Also the computer seems to be running a bit cooler?!?!
I'm quite impressed actually...just a bit shy in believing it.
I'm also not so convinced the raptor is making things perform any faster or more stable over the seagate...so far...

[bbob]

Hello Doug,
Thanks for the update. Is the PCI meter still running high? No crashes or panics? Sounds like you're diggin' it. I usually run 48 tracks or less at 96K... so I'd probably have power to burn. Man I would love to get off of FW drives and onto SATA and still be able to keep seperate drives for each record.
Anybody else out there using Firmtek with a G5 2.5 ???
Brent

[doug_hti]

Hello Doug,
Thanks for the update. Is the PCI meter still running high? No crashes or panics? Sounds like you're diggin' it. I usually run 48 tracks or less at 96K... so I'd probably have power to burn. Man I would love to get off of FW drives and onto SATA and still be able to keep seperate drives for each record.
Anybody else out there using Firmtek with a G5 2.5 ???
Brent

I tracked a lot more on top of a full out mix.....worked great....

i also opened the 96k session on ONE drive...and it was fine. PCI meter ran about 50-60%...peaked about 75% in bursts, not sustained. Disk was only showing around 50%.

And again, I still have NOT seen or felt any advantages to the raptor drive.

I've been very curious about this for a while...and am very pleased with the performance.

Also, I accidently mixed drive types on one session (firewire and SATA) and I did get 9073 errors occasionally....so as stated...no go.

I was also a bit concerned with the firmtek enclosure (for how small they are), getting too hot. The drives stayed MUCH cooler than i expected. The enclosure and caddies are considerably cheaper than Mac Gurus...However with mac gurus, you can go more than 2 drives..so for whatever that is worth...that's all i found out.

cheers

[Imagine]

Anybody else out there using Firmtek with a G5 2.5 ???
Brent

I've been using a two port Firmtek SATA PCI card and a Raptor 10K drive with a G5 dual 2 for nearly 8 months, and I haven't had any problems whatsoever.

I'm thinking about adding a few extra SATA drives, so I'm looking into a new PCI card.

http://www.barefeats.com/hard44.html

Looks interesting.

Dean