jumping ship to PT, suggest a drive

[MLP]

I'm jumping ship from Nuendo to Pro Tools and its been a while since I've worked with PT. I need drive suggestions for a new Mac set up (ditching the PC as well). I know most of what I want but I'm not sure which drive route to go.

Track count is not as important as the drives ability to handle MASSIVE edit density. The last session I edited (using Nuendo with IDE Drives) had 7600 edits and crossfades at 24/48. The projects are usually around 28 tracks, but the majority of edits are across the first 12 to 16. My IDE drive on the PC would choke quite a bit, and bouncing the tracks (consolidating reigons) for the 4 minute songs would take roughly 45 minutes! My disk meter would stay pegged. What is my best option? I'm not concerned with cost (with the exception of a fibre drive solution...way to much $$$). SCSI, External Firewire, SATA?

Also I've heard that if I go SCSI, I should not mix IDE or SATA with SCSI(hard drives AND cdrw). I should go all SCSI for the best drive performance. Anyone know if this is fact or fiction?

[Slim Shady]

Skip SCSI, it's dead for the most part, and qualified SCSI cards for use with ProTools changes every year or so, which means you constantly have to keep upgrading your SCSI card. Most folks use either a second internal IDE drive or an external firewire drive with the oxford 911 chipset. If you're anticipating heavy drive use, you might want to consider using 2 drives to lighten the load. For suggestions on specific manufacturers or enclosures, try searching the forum - this topic comes up quite a bit and there's tons of relevant information and opinions available.

[mindnoise]

HI SCSI is retreating into the high end buisness but not dead, perhaps to the consumer.

Right now the ATTO UL3D/S and UL4D/S are the best choice. I use the UL3D with a 10K Fujitsu drive and have transferrates of 50MB/s. It´s expensive yes and apple does not help any to ease the pain of installation. well...

Most probably why IDE is choking on your PC is a BAD SATA/ATA controller on the motherboard.
The Apple is surly a better one. There are also a couple of S/ATA RAID controllers
However S/ATA uses part of the CPU power if not run by an seperate controllers.
If you want further info, go here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Pa...lers&Template=

but assuming you wil buy a new G5 you won´t need it.

SoftRaid is NOT supported with ProTools 6.

However you can tell PT to `round robin´ it´s tracks across selected drives.
That eases the load, too. And use ONE HD for your System and Apps and a SECOND for your audio.
This will get you higher trackcounts.
Western DIGITAL are now making 10K spinned drives which should provide enough throughput
to make you happy.

You can mix scsi and s/ata as you like that´s not problem. The only problem is if you get a say U-SCSI (20mb/s) and a later SCSI protocol (UW/U2W/U160/U320) on the SAME channel; then the faster device will adept to the slower one. So you need a Dualchannel host adapter then.


so far

and welcome to the mac side




best

[where02190]

What make/model Mac are we talking here?

[MLP]

Right now I'm looking at the Dual 1.8 G5 (although it seems to tall to be rack mounted). The Dual 1.25 G4 is also a strong possibility.

[where02190]

Your most efficient audio drive swould be a second internal, which both machines are capable of easily installed by the user.

for the G-4, and IDE drive 7200rpm or faster. Check the specs for the G-5 for drives, I beleive they use SATA drives.

[fly-deluxe]

I picked up a 7200 rpm Firewire 800 Lacie drive. Supposedly FW800 is twice as fast as FW400 (standard Firewire). I can't compare the two, but I haven't had much problems with mine.