New internal audio drive

[crazyfoo']

Hi,

Im just about to buy a new internal drive for my 2GHz G5.


There's a lot of drives out there and I was wondering if anyone had any recomendations? Im looking at getting a 200-250Gig capacity or so.


Also how important is the cache size for audio work, specificly with protools?

Thanks!

[Squint Music]

personally id check in your "about this mac" page and find out what drive you've already got and get a similar one but larger capacity if needed. It'll probably be a maxtor or a seagate in a G5.

[David Penick]

I have an internal Maxtor 250 GB (7200 RPM) dedicated audio drive. It has given me no problems in the year that I've had it. Not sure about the cache size question.

[Phil Jeffers]

I've had good performance with a Seagate 250GB SATA. I popped this into my G5 2GHz CPU very easily & partitioned for video/audio (I'm into post production sound). I ran some heavy duty tests on this drive for audio with very impressive results. I had the disk performance window up while I recorded 32 tracks simultantiously at 24Bit, 48kHz & the disk didn't break a sweat. Seagate's are a favourite among many & come with a 5 year warranty. I purchased mine for a very reasonable price here in Australia also. It's amazing how much HDD's & RAM have come down over the last few years... Much quiter, faster & more reliable than using an external drive. Internal SATA is the way to go. I still need to get a dedicated disk repair application to run on this drive regularly (Disk Utility will only run on the boot volume, with the OS installed). Disk Warrior is a really good app for this I've heard. Excellent for OS X.

[crazyfoo']

Thanks!

I was thinking of a seagate.

What is the cache size on the drive you have? How important is it?

[maccool]

Here's some info from Storage Review;

"A good empirical example may be found by comparing Western Digital's Caviar WD2000JB (8 MB) with the WD2000BB (2 MB) (cache). As illustrated by the comparison, the 8-megabyte buffer delivers a single-user, desktop machine a 30+% performance gain (vs. a 2MB buffer. Ed.) This gain goes a long way to closing the gap between 7200 RPM ATA drives and their 10,000 RPM SCSI/SATA counterparts."

That said, I believe that, with PTLE in a real-world situation, you'll run out of CPU grunt before you get hamstrung by slow HDD I/O even with a 2MB-cache drive, although PTLE 7 may have changed the game there a bit.

Your question may be moot though, because all the new Seagate, Maxtor, and Hitachi drives have 8 or 16MB caches. I'd go for a Barracuda 7200.8

[crazyfoo']

Thanks for the info!

bought a seagate 250gig with 8meg cache. sorted!