Inexpensive firewire hard drive deal

[Herkimer]

I often see posts from people looking for inexpensive external firewire drives. Well today's your lucky day. Musician's Friend has an 80Gb Fantom drive on sale today for $69. Just surf over to their website and click on the "stupid deal of the day."

I got one free with something else I bought. The drive works well and I've had no problems.

Hurry. That deal usually gets sold out by mid-morning.

No more whining about the cost of an external drive!

[PrestonKD]

I don't have any Fantom drives. Maybe there is something special about them of which I am not aware. That doesn't really seem like a great price. The transfer rate of this drive is only 40 MB/s. I do audio and video work and buy hard drives any time I see a good deal. Last weekend I got a 250GB firewire drive from CompUSA for $79.00 after rebate. It's transfer rate is 50 MB/s. Still not setting any speed records but it is working fine for video on my AVID system so it should be more than fine for audio. If you have a CompUSA you may want to check their weekly specials. This is the third one I have picked up in the last few months. I don't like CompUSA but anytime they have a special like that I make an exception.

[3over3]

Hmm... can't find the word "Oxford" in the pdf. Without an Oxford chipset, it would mean it's somewhat unsupported. As is usually mentioned at this point though, "unsupported" isn't the same as "doesn't work".

Buyer, beware...

Regarding the 50Mb/s rate - that's got to be Firewire 800, right? Firewire 400 is theoretically only capable of 48Mb/s and this is often reduced by "real world factors" - other points in the chain.

Firewire 400 is easily cabable of meeting the 32-track PTLE limit:

From the DigiDrive Firewire guide (http://akarchive.digidesign.com/supp...Wire_Guide.pdf):

"The data transfer rate required for 32-track, 24-bit performance (at a
sample rate of 44.1 kHz) is 4.04 MB per second of sustained throughput."

I get a solid 40Mb/s from a FW400/Oxford/Barracuda concoction. On 32-voice limited PTLE, this leaves plenty of room for disk sample streaming.

[Herkimer]

Supported or not, I can give testimony that it works. I've had it hooked up to a computer running an -001 with 8 tracks in via ADAT lightpipe. I recorded 12-14 tracks at once onto it. (44 KHz sampling)

$69 seemed like a decent price to me. I had been looking about two weeks ago at online stores like TigerDirect and NewEgg and didn't see anything that cheap that didn't require a mail-in rebate. While 80 Gb is small by today's standards, it's enough for me.

[PrestonKD]

This is an Acomdata firewire 400 drive. As I understand it, the speed of firewire 400 is 49.152 MB/s. The speed I quoted is the one listed on the box. I haven't done any tests. Either they are rounding up generously or they are talking about burst speed and not sustained data rate. This is the drive I bought.

http://compusa.shoplocal.com/compusa...CompUSA-070304

[Bob L]

I bought a Micronet 160 GB 1394/USB1 drive a couple years ago, as it was on the approved list. Works fine. Fantom is the maker of Micronet. The cases are remarkably similar, which would lead me to think that guts might be as well. If I hadn't found another Micronet drive, I was prepared to buy a Fantom.

All that said, the LaCie 250 referenced above would be a far more smokin' deal...

[EGS]

A bit off topic, but if you need a cheap and good transfer /storage drive, there's a Buffalo 250GB on sale right now at Micro Center for only $69.99. This is a USB2 ext drive, and is therefore NOT suitable for use as a Pro-tools session drive. A good transfer/storage drive, though.

[3over3]

As I understand it, the speed of firewire 400 is 49.152 MB/s.

... this is all to do with how big your thousands are - in computer terminology, it's common for the "k" in kilobytes to mean 1024, not 1000 (1024 = 2 to the power 10, the nearest binary equivalent).
The confusion grows when two thousands are multiplied - a Megabyte can be 1,000,000 or 1,024,000 or 1,048,576 bytes.

As such, manufacturers have a few different numerical values to choose from for Megabytes and Gigabytes and can choose the best number to make their products look good.

48Mb/s x 1.024 = 49.152Mb/s, meaning your megabytes here are more decimal than mine.
This "confusion" is also the reason why Windows reports a capacity of around 298Gb (binary thousands) on a 320Gb (decimal thousands) hard-drive.