FireWire Performance Survey

[splicestudios]

Can I confirm that this thread is all about using external FW drives for audio drive?

Just for comparision's sake, I have a Dual 1.8GHz G5 (1.5GB RAM, 23HD) and use a second internal drive, a 76GB Western Digital Raptor that spins at 10,000rpm. I use the Canopus ADVC-100 for video recording to the boot drive. Reliable performance, I do mostly post production for TV and have a lot of plug-ins and generally 20-25 tracks minimum, this drive is fine. I back up to external FW drives, although long-term I'm still not so sure about going to DVD-R - drives are getting cheap enough that I'm happy to stick with backing up to two drives and getting more drives when I need 'em.

[sndgeek]

Firewire experience has been good here. Using a combination of LaCie d2 Extreme drives (400 and 800), LaCie PocketDrives (400 only, bus powered), and Rocstor drives (400 only). I don't see much difference between 400 and 800 in terms of speed and/or performance. Even on the bus-powered drives I get full 32 track performance with tons of plugins and recording 2-4 tracks back to the same drive. I highly reccomend LaCie, both for their quality and customer service.

[drBill]

How do you turn off quartz extreme?

This thread will tell you how:

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread...=&sb=5&o=&vc=1

I wish Digi would weigh in officially about this issue.

[kcurry]

Thanks to all for your experiences. I think I'll pull the ATTO card out and give the FireWire drives a shot. I'm sorry to hear that EZQuest isn't well thought of, as I already bought the drives. I chose them because of Digi's note about the drives in the Compatibility section...

[froyo]

Hello. As a freelancer I have had enough good experiences with many different Firewire drives. At this point, this should really not be an issue anymore. I think Firewire has proved that it's up to the task. If you have the money to spend fibre channel is definitely a more robust, faster, secure, solid option.

[Shawn B]

In our studio we had been using scsi drives in Glyph hot swap racks for our mix3 system. They worked fine for many years. Very expensive. But when we added an HD3 rig we also started adding firewire drives for backup. We now have something like 35-40 firewire drives that we use for pretty much everything. Not just backup. Track counts are high (60+ tracks). The firewire drives are just a tiny bit slower than the scsi drives. Barely noticeable unless you have very dense edits across a ton of tracks. But even then they seem to chug along.
Firewire drives are so much cheaper that we treat them like tape. All clients must buy two drives for their sessions. One working drive and one backup. We drop them into removable firewire cases from http://www.cooldrives.com/firen.html for about $15.00 per case.
The only problems we have ever had were from EZQuest drives and Western Digital drives. We had two external EZQuest Cobra drives that died after only a few months. We sent them both back and got replacements and then they died again soon after that. So no more EZquest drives. I really think it was the cases that were poorly designed. The drives in the EZQuest cases were third party. We have had two Western Digital drives with issues. The Western Digital drives lasted longer than the EZQuest drives, but still died. The other brands we use are Seagate, Maxtor, and a couple IBM/Fuji drives. All of those have been rock solid for years. These drives get used 10-12 hours per day almost everyday of the year.

Some tips.. Of course only get 7200 rpm drives. We have a couple 8meg buffer versions and they do seem to be just a little faster than the 2meg versions. Only run them up to about 80% capacity. We have seen real slow down issues past this point. Limit your drive sizes. It's tempting to buy 250+ gig drives. But let me tell you from experience that when a drive goes bad or you have to do complete image backups, you don't want that much data at risk. We have found that 80-120 gig drives are the most cost effective per gigabyte; and the ratio of data size to data loss risk is adequate.
Keep your backup drives off line.. i.e. we have a four bay firewire enclosure. We only put the backup drive in the bay to do the backup and then it is immediately removed. If your systems takes a lightning strike or a bad power surge you will likely lose the whole 4 bay enclosure. Backups will be gone. We had this happen once this summer and luckily it was only a couple days worth of work.

[Howardk]

Shawn - All good info and advice. . . thanks for the link. I had not heard of cooldrives.com and they have a good selection and pricing. Temperature is always a big concern with harddrives. Which enclosure(s) did you select?

[Shawn B]

HowardK,

We have a couple enclosures. The 4 bay is this model. http://www.cooldrives.com/qubayredk1st.html . The cases/caddies we use are the versions that have the front fan as well as the standard rear fan. Found here http://www.cooldrives.com/cooltray2.html .Make sure you get the "DUAL Channel Option 2x Oxford 911 Boards" for an extra 47.98 for the 4 bay case. It allows all the drives to be masters so you can put any drive in any slot. If you are going to buy multiple extra caddies, (it comes with 4) call them because they offer bulk discounts. I think the last time we bought 10 extra caddies we paid $12.00ea. The extra fans mack it a little louder, but we have a machine room so it doesn't really matter.

[Howardk]

Finally recieved the drive enclosure from Cool drives, with the option to run all Master drives. Unfortunetly my computer doesn't like them and has started to crash in a number of different ways such as Kernal crash, ProTools just aborts on startup and crashes mid session. It all just started in the last week, since I connected up this drive enclosure. I disconnected and put my old FW enclosure into service and it seems ok. I have done limitied troublshooting, so it might be something else, but it is sure looking like these things are trouble. Anyone else having problems with this product from Cool Drives?

[doug_hti]

Finally recieved the drive enclosure from Cool drives, with the option to run all Master drives. Unfortunetly my computer doesn't like them and has started to crash in a number of different ways such as Kernal crash, ProTools just aborts on startup and crashes mid session. It all just started in the last week, since I connected up this drive enclosure. I disconnected and put my old FW enclosure into service and it seems ok. I have done limitied troublshooting, so it might be something else, but it is sure looking like these things are trouble. Anyone else having problems with this product from Cool Drives?

no problems here (with all masters)