ESATA or FW 800

[brianjanthony]

I currently am using a 1TB Seagate as a record drive in my MacPro. Problem is, all the drive bays are full, and my 1TB is pretty darn close to full with current client sessions. No chance of offloading stuff at the moment.

I'm thinking of getting an Esata enclosure to hold 2 or more drives. I already have a dual FW800 enclosure in house.

Many of my sessions are HUGE. Many tracks etc. Was wondering if anyone had any pros/cons to going FW or esata as my main external record drives.

Or any suggestions which esata enclosures to get?

brian

[TimNielsen]

If you go with eSATA enclosures you'll have to get some kinda interface. Or you'll have to go with the Newertech eSATA cable for the Mac Pro which will give you two external eSATA ports (but be aware that these ports you can't mount and dismount once the computer is started, the drives have to be connected at startup).

eSATA is theoretically faster than Firewire. But a dual fireware 800 case, if running SATA drives inside, is probably as 'practically' fast an an external eSATA enclosure.

[pezking]

eSata isn't supported with Pro Tools remember...

[brianjanthony]

Yes I know esata isn't supported. :-(

As far as the FW 800... I have enclosures that hold older IDE drives, not SATA. But am I correct in assuming SATA vs IDE doesn't matter, since the limiting factor is the FW bus?

[Mark Dann]

The newer sata drives are much faster, and fw800 will reflect those speeds. A current issue sata drive in a fw800 case will get you 60-70 megs per seconds. That is faster than the older ide drives can produce. Time to upgrade.

[myke2242]

Something to think about is compatibility with other editors, mixers and etc… eSATA is great but i don't know a lot of people using it on a day to day basis. I would say make sure what ever enclosure you buy. make sure the eSATA ports are accompanied by FW or USB.

[Norad155]

eSata hands down.
We have macPros running a Sonnet Tempo esata card with glyph drives. It's the same as working on an internal drive.
We run full length feature sessions off of a single drive with no problem.

Can't find a downside to eSata

[brianjanthony]

true. compatiblity is key.

I truly thought 1 TB was enough for current clients. But now I have 100 gig free. Which is a lot. But I like to keep drives with a little wiggle room on them.

I'm not quite clear on how the Sata drives would be faster inside the FW 800 case. Is it that older 7200 RPM IDE drives didn't take advantage of the FW 800 bus's bandwidth? I'll gladly buy whatever is necessary. I just want to understand the point a little better.

I'm afraid now that I've made sessions around the internal SATA and its capabilities, I will run into probs when opening sessions off of the FW800 enclosures. (maybe less tracks or more glitchy).

[JWalkerPostAudio]

Just because eSata isn't "supported" doesn't mean you should avoid using it. I've been using Sata and eSata drives for a couple years now and they run great with Pro Tools. I've had far more issues with firewire than I have Sata.

-Justin

[Michael James]

Originally Posted by Norad155

eSata hands down.
We have macPros running a Sonnet Tempo esata card with glyph drives. It's the same as working on an internal drive.
We run full length feature sessions off of a single drive with no problem.

Can't find a downside to eSata

Same success here, on a G5 for at least a couple years. I happily retired my SCSI 10k Cheetahs after installing the eSATA card. Rock solid performance and reliability--until last week, that is...

The Tempo Sonnet-X4P firmware updater script (v.2.1.7), which permits hot-swapping, will cause problems with Mac OS 10.5.6, preventing the ability to drag & drop (or copy and paste) files in the Finder, immediately after running the script. This is repeatable, even on a fresh, lean boot drive with only Leopard and Pro Tools installed. So far, the only fix I found was to erase the boot drive and downgrade to 10.5.5. Further, I am not convinced that PT8cs2 and the Tempo card are fully compatible because after the PT upgrade, I experienced a few kernel panics and glitches in files (after consolidating or Recording To Disk) that were accessed via the eSATA ports. Fortunately, all is stable at the moment. We'll see...