FW 800 RAID ARRAY

[minister]

hi folks!

say, i have IVORY which is supposed to have its best performance on a FW 800 RAID ARRAY. so i am thinking about doing that. one reason is becasue i have SO many darn samples and VI's that i have run out of space on my FW 400. i was looking to get an internal SATA, but i have too much stuff. i need over 100 GB. -- what with distorted REALITY, SAmple TANK, TRILOGY, STYLUS RMX, ATMOSHPERE, MIROSLAV PHILHARMONIK, and lots of old SAMPLE CELL samples...

i looked at spectrasonic's site, but couldn't find an answer.

any issue with putting the SPECTRASONICS stuff on a FW 800 ARRAY?

...waiting to hear from tech support...NAMM this week!

thanks in advance!

[minister]

thanks to all who posted response! i'm KIDDING!

i couldn't think of a reason why the SPECTRASONICS plugs would not work on an FW 800 RAID...but since i know PT doesn't like it audio on a RAID, i thought i'd ask.


so, i forged ahead and bought two 160GB FW 800's. these, if you care to know:

ELITE PRO DRIVES

MAN! is that FAST! phew! Virutual instruments load in 1/3rd the time. patches load in 1/3rd the time. as fast as SATA is, i think FW 800 RAID is the way to go with lots of samples and .dat and vi files. i have about 114GB in samples and junk. that seemed like a lot of expensive SATA's wasted.

[markjohn]

I hope the following is helpful.

In the last three months we've been using a Quad Drive Mini Enclosure with Initio 2430 Chip from http://www.cooldrives.com/qudrmifi80dr.html.

When we first received it I had three days to test it and to give it thump's up or down before commissioning it for session work. So, I installed four 300GB Barracudas and plugged it in to see what came up. The OS mounted four distinct drives that were connected to the bridgeboard, but no RAID0. I contact tech-support at Cooldrives they were very responsive and quickly emailed me a Mac utility to flash the bridgeboard to achieve my desired RAID0 setting. No luck, some submenu was missing from the GUI of the utility app. We have PCs so they quickly once again emailed the Initio utility for our wintel box. Bingo! The utility recognized the bridgeboard. I follow the instructions in the enclosed email to successfully get the box to RAID all four drives to a massive 1.1 terabyte volume.

I immediately connect it to a G5 with a HD3 rig and the enclosure handled a simultaneous 64 audio track recording session with out a hiccup. Play back was even more impressive; everything played back with some seriously dense edits spread out all over all of the 64 tracks.

Here's the bad news, lately the volume dismounts with out reason and the finder pops up the "you've improperly disconnected the drive," dialogue box (can't remember the exact message). I haven't had the chance to trouble shoot this latest development while I'm quite suspicious that our upgrade to Tiger has something to do with it. Initially the drive was commissioned under 10.3.9 and I don't recall any issues for at least a month, if not longer. I would highly recommend this enclosure if it wasn't for this glitch.

Ohh, back to your question, our whole 90GB+ Sample Library resides on that drive. All three Spectrosonics VIs load up and run just fine.

Hope this helps
-m

[minister]

markjohn,

thanks for the info! glad to know you are doing the samples on a RAID as well. so far so good here...

[Lee Blaske]

I hope the following is helpful.

In the last three months we've been using a Quad Drive Mini Enclosure with Initio 2430 Chip from http://www.cooldrives.com/qudrmifi80dr.html.

I've never used a FW enclosure with Initio chips, but from everything I've read, they're for PCs, and not recommended for Macs. YMMV, but it's probably best to stick with cases using Oxford chips if the drives are to be used on a Mac.

It's probably going to be a somewhat moot point soon, though, as it appears that there might not be any FW800 on the new Intel Macs (just FW400). External SATA drives might be the new ticket for serious storage.

Lee Blaske