View Single Post
  #3  
Old 09-07-2009, 05:14 PM
flommer flommer is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Boise, ID
Posts: 4,118
Default Re: about to buy disks...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Londoner View Post
I'm experiencing 6086 and 9128 errors at a rate that I wasn't experiencing a month ago while working on the same PT session. I've added very little to that session during that time. Activity Monitor tells me that my CPU usage is below 40% when the problems happen.

I'm trying to eliminate all potential causes of problems. A new FireWire cable is on order, in case the one between my PowerBook and my 002 Rack is causing problems. And I'm ready to add external disk capacity as recommended by the DUC Troubleshooting page.

It would appear from some posts that the ideal is to have not one but two external FireWire drives -- one for the PT session and all its children, another for the Kontakt samples. Question number 1: did I get that right?

Question number 2: What kind of external drives are really good? The DUC Troubleshooting page says they must spin at 7200rpm but I wonder whether ProTools really cares about that; as Western Digital says, "USB 2.0 and Firewire 400/800 have yet to approach the transfer rates of the internal hard drives we use in our external enclosures."

Considering that every 7200rpm drive I've looked at has several bad reviews by users who feel burned, it may be useful to know whether a 5400rpm drive would do the job just as well.

Thanks for any comments.
Absolutely do not get a 5400 rpm drive...

HD performance is fairly complicated, in that it involves several different variables. seek time, multiple writes, sustained writes, multiple reads, sustained reads.. I don't feel it can be narrowed down to a single number like the max Mb/sec number which is implied by talking about FW or USB bus speed...

If you decide to directly go against Digi's advice, then you are setting yourself up for buyer's remorse...

I'm not sure where you are seeing the bad reviews.. Maybe you should list what you were looking at and see what kind of experiences users of protools have had..

Keep in mind that some of the users have problems related to the enclosure and not necessarily the HD itself.. I have a couple FW enclosures already, but if I was to get another one, I would buy the enclosure from OWC and put the SATA HD of my choice in it... As opposed to buying an off the shelf My Book or whatever.. It seems as those are the people who report difficulties (not necessarily My Book.. )

I don't know specifically if Kontakt is one of the plugins that benefits from it's samples being on it's own disc, but if it streams samples from the HD in real time, then that would be the correct thinking..


As far as the errors go, you need to make absolutely sure that all your plugins are compatible. Note that the NI stuff seems to be particularly troublesome..

You say you have a Powerbook? What version of PT? What laptop, specifically...?
__________________
MacPro3ghz, 6GB, 10.7.5, PT10.3.2, Digi002 factory/toolkit2/PTIEP, 11R
Reply With Quote