Any luck with Firewire Drives?

[rope777]

I have read a little while back some people were trying Firewire drives on the G4 macs. I wanted to know if they are working or not. I just got a g4/400 and would rather go with firewire than scsi? If anyone has any new info,please let me know.

Rob

[AdamFrick]

huh?

Only 8 tracks per 13 gig drive, or per 4 gig partition?

-adam

[rope777]

why only partition for 4 gig?

[This message has been edited by rope777 (edited March 02, 2000).]

[spookyvoodoo]

I've had luck with the VST 13 gig. Just partition it to 4g and use that to record. The crappy thing is that you can only get about 8 tracks per drive. So it might be actually cheaper to go SCSI until 10,000 RPM firewire drives come out

[spookyvoodoo]

Sorry about the confusion. The fastest Firewire drive out that I know of is the VST full height 13 gig. Still, it's only 7200 RPM with a 10 ms access time. If you partition the drive to a 4 gig segment, and only record on that segment, it improves the seek time because there is less drive to scan. However, this is only good for about 8 tracks per drive. The weird thing is, I can record about 24 tracks per drive, but it can only play back 8! I wonder why that is?

Hope this helps a bit
-Spooky

[TedRackley]

Spooky,
Do you get the drive too slow error message? What specifically is the problem?

[rope777]

Emagic just emailed me and they say that firewire drives should handle audio recording without any problems, though I think I will pick up an atto card and wait till firewire is proven without any problems.

[genebail]

Spooky I don't know the answer as to why the drive allows fewer tracks for playback versus recording. But perhaps it has to do with differences in how the drive head behaves during writing a file and reading a file. During writing perhaps the head does not have to search the entire partition because the file is written contiguosly and it "anticipates" where it needs to be for the next written piece of information. While during playback the head probably has to scan the entire partition looking for files that are to be read at that particular instant. If this guess has any merit then smaller partitions would yield more tracks on playback but not affect the number of tracks during recording. Just a random thought.
Gene