Which Firewire drive to buy?

[CraigLearmont]

Hi guys.

I recently purchased an 800 Mhz Tibook and a Magma 4 slot chassis for my Mix Cubed rig.

I was wondering which Firewire drives you guys are using with the most success.

I need to do a live 24 track session on July 1st, and I need a heavy duty reliable drive.

OWC? Granite Digital? Glyph? Others?

Please respond here or email [email protected]

Thanks in advance, and God bless!

[KRW]

I've been using a Maxtor 80 Gig Firewire drive with no problems whatsoever. I have it hooked to Apple's recent 933 model, with a Mix Cube system inside (no chassis). I've played back about 28 tracks simultaeneous. Hope that helps.

Also, I hear you need a drive with the Oxford 911 chipset. Based on my results, I assume Maxtor does.

[KRW]

One thing I forgot to mention - I have not tried recording 24 tracks simultaneously with a Maxtor. Just playback. Hope other users can advise on capture capability of the various drives.

best of luck

[Wyn]

Originally posted by CraigLearmont:
Hi guys.

I recently purchased an 800 Mhz Tibook and a Magma 4 slot chassis for my Mix Cubed rig.

I was wondering which Firewire drives you guys are using with the most success.

I need to do a live 24 track session on July 1st, and I need a heavy duty reliable drive.

OWC? Granite Digital? Glyph? Others?

Please respond here or email [email protected]

Thanks in advance, and God bless!

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">One thing we have found is that Digi's requirement for a Firewire drive with the Oxford 911 Firewire bridge chipset should be taken seriously. We have seen a couple of different cases where clients working at home, on a two different Firewire drives, have ended up in BIG trouble. One worked on a drive for about a week before the entire drive, (and all its contents), got unrecoverably corrupted. Another time a client tansferred something onto a firewire drive that seemed like it was working fine, all the files went across, he checked a couple of sessions to make sure they opened up, everything LOOKED fine. When he played back the audio files they were pure hash. Very weird. We have seen NO problems with any Firewire drives containing the Oxford 911 digital bridge chipset.

Hope this helps.

[doug_hti]

i've been on a lot of forums that use FW for video, which can be a lot more demanding on a throughput basis...
Unless money is not an issue and you just want to immediately rack some glyphs...
then I would buy the FW chasis seperately from the hard drive.

I have bought cases from www.fwdepot.com
They have been great with me and there prices are great. Like everyone says, just make sure you get the oxford 911 bridgeset.

They provide a lot of options.
I have a couple of the BT35 enclosures which have been great for me and are very compact, but only because I have to fly them a lot and I'm not going to risk racking and checking, so I can stick a couple in my briefcase with my Ti Book and keep them safe...
otherwise if they weren't going to be mobile in that sense, I may go with one of the larger enclosures that can mount 2-4 drives or so.

As far as hard drives, the IBMs have had really good ratings...the 60GXP models specifically, but I think most of these have been phased out for the 120GXPs...
As you probably know, be sure to match your multiple drives if your running them together often.
The Seagate Baracuda's perform pretty well and are reliable (for me) as well.

www.googlegear.com has some pretty good deals, but have never purchased from them.

From what I hear I would stay away from Maxtor and Western Digital (I have had failed WD drive before)...

and by the way...I sent a drive out to Nashville to have a album dumped from the mix masters that were on cdrs to a drive to have copies myself and to make live show tracks. So far I've pulled up multiple 80+ track projects (all 24 bit 48k) and I get all tracks to playback fine. Then I routed all the tracks (minus lead vox) to 10 stereo submixes and recorded them fine (simultaneously). I actually forgot that I didn't transfer the projects that were still on the Firewire drives because it worked.

hope this helps

[rtcstudio]

There are a lot more options for getting firewire than there used to be.

I highly recommend www.scsipro.com
That's Granite Digital.

Talk to Kenny. He has hooked me and my assistant up with great bays, removable drawers, bridgeboards, extremely reliable cables etc.

I buy IBM 60 gig Deskstar 7200 RPM drives and put them in Granite Digital enclosures. At this point we have 6 such drives in constant use, have been from studio to studio, have done remotes in New York, Pensacola, Dublin Ireland, and other places without one problem.

[Question]

http://www.clubmac.com/clubmac/shop/...sp?dpno=972569

[slangification]

I also have been using the Maxtor 80GB FW drive for several months, and it's been really good so far on my HD system.

Definitely make sure you get the Oxford 911 chipset. (I'm sure in retrospect they wish they had chosen a different name for that chipset).

It's also worth mentioning that when I brought this drive over to a studio with a Mix system, the drive kept freezing up during big file transfers until it was partitioned into two 40gb partitions.

[MARVINBASS]

Check out the HUSH drive for portability.
http://www.AVammo.com/
Pocket size with high track counts. I highly recommend this for the Titanium. Conventional, I use Glyph Firewire Drives. Never had problems.

[Hoops]

EZQuest Cobra 40 gig, tested for Pro Tools,
plug and play... 24 tracks no problem!
Has a fan, but is quiet. Only using it with
Pro Tools LE on Mbox and iBook, but it works
great! Using Seagate Barracuda ATA w/ my
TDM system for now.

--wadesattic