SCSI versus Firewire400

[Mano]

Hi all of you !
What do you prefer for a TDM system on MacOSX tiger ?
SCSI ( Seagate-cheetahs ) Ultra 160 witn ATTO UL#D or better
OR firewire 400 drives( glyph or equal...).
I bought a glyph GT 103 system ( 3x firewire 250GB) today and my first experience was fairly good !
Running 38 audiotracks and puching in another 12 tracks ( spread over three firewiredisks ).
I cannot feel a difference in smoothnes compared to SCSI ( ultra 320 on ATTO-hba UL3D.)
Consolidating regions, audiosuite processing and other disk-intensive tasks ran as smooth as SCSI.
G5 dual 2gHZ OSX 10.4.2
Protools TDM 6.9.3cs2 on HD4accel
Procontrol
WHAT IS YOUR EXPERIENCE ???

[sleadley]

On our HD 3 system for Orchestral recording (up to 48 tracks @ 48k/24 bit) I always use SCSI and a dual channel SCSI card like the UL3D. There is plenty of headroom in this configuartion. I have used a system like this live (for the latest Eagles DVD live recording) to do 72 tracks @ 96k/24bit with no problems. Firewire is great for playback but I find I get more recording problems with lots of tracks. This will get better as Firewire matures. Remember that there is an ATA to FW bridge and usually slower 7200 rpm drives in the Firewire cases and SCSI drives are native and have far better read write performance.
So still for best performance I would go for SCSI.
Best Regards
Simon L.

[GkHz]

True, with digital audio tracking and editing, SCSI is indeed faster than FireWire400, FireWire800, and even eSATA (which we've released as an external, with the new GT050Q-Quad interface). The reason is simple... All of the above are based on 7,200RPM Parallel ATA and Serial ATA drives, whereas SCSI spins at 10,000RPMs. Since audio is seek intensive, the rotational speed is crucial. In video editing, the files are fewer, and much larger than audio files, so bandwidth (or throughput) becomes the key factor.

On a semi-related note, if anyone wants accurate track count test results with FireWire400, FireWire800, and eSATA, please feel free to contact me directly, here at Glyph.

Easy,

Giovanni.
Solution Specialist
Glyph Technologies.
[email protected]