what disc drives should i choose?

[lightning ad]

I'm compiling the kit list for our new tdm suite, and i'm not sure which hard drives to get....scsi or firewire?

i used to think only scsi could be used with avid/digidesign kit, but now i see digidesign have their own brand of firewire drive for a lot less money than the scsi ones.

which would you all recommend i get?

[georgia]

Firewire GLYPH technologies new 6 drive bay ( GT Series ) with hot swap drives... wow very well designed, works great, and the removable drives are bulit like brick-[bleep]-houses.... I've installed them in one of my best clients ( The Inc. ) . They run them runs them 2 shifts a day... No issues... We're going to be installing them in 2 other studios soon. And I am planning on upgrading to them myself shortly.

http://www.glyphtech.com/site/home_intro.html

cheers
georgia

[Richard Fairbanks]

I've got to admit that scsi and osx has so far been a superior disappointment. Those fast and expensive scsi drives just do not work very well with osx. Thank you so much, Apple. Unless the scsi drivers are significantly improved, there are NO obvious choices if you need as many tracks as possible plus video in the box. Firewire is cheap and works very well, as long as you get the faster drives. If I had to buy now that is what I would do. Personally, I am holding out for better scsi in hopes that by the time I must upgrade again I will not have to change every drive on every system I own in order to get the track counts I need once in a while. Or I'll jump over to windows and suffer with other irritations.

[dr sound]

Storcase was at the NAMM show and I talked with them. Within 90 days they are coming out with a 4 bay Firewire Oxford 922 rack listing for $800. The support at Storcase is EXCELLENT!.

[Tiago Silva]

The SCSI support in the OS X kernel is very incipient so far because IMO Apple programmers do not want to do a lot of work on a parallel interface. When SCSI turns serial, then we'll see good support from Apple.

Besides, X.1 (Puma) had a programming framework (SCSI actions) that is supposed to be abandoned for the new, and still immature, "SCSI Family" that appeared in X.2 (Jaguar). Couple that with flagging support by Adaptec, the fact that you can't boot from a scsi disk, and the disorientation within ATTO, and things are looking grim for SCSI on Macintosh - unless it's FibreChannel SCSI, of course, since Apple has an XServe RAID to support.

I'm still reeling from the lack of support for SCSI scanners and hot mounting of SCSI devices that we lost since 9.2...

[amiller]

Georgia, glad to hear you say that about Glyph. I had a great meeting with them at NAMM and am considering the GT 103 (1U - 3 hot swap drives) myself...

[DClarkson]

Those fast and expensive scsi drives just do not work very well with osx

Do you actually still work with SCSI?

[Richard Fairbanks]

Yes. All of our storage is fast and expensive scsi drives and ATTO cards. The performance difference between 10.3 and 9.2.2 is astounding. OSX with AVXL video and HD hardware does not reliably provide enough tracks for me to stay on it. Sometimes I only need 20 tracks, sometimes I need way more. I had to go back to 5.3.1 on 9.2.2. I am waiting, and hoping, things will improve. I should mention that my results have been with an ancient computer, a G4/867. That is my slowest G4 machine, but also the one currently running the AVXL in my larger mix room. It is still a supported machine, and my results have not been very good.