FIREWIRE DRIVES X SCSI DRIVES

[Alécio Costa]

Should anyone tell me if I should buy another SCSI drive like digi 18k/36k (which work perfectly here) or move to a firewire drive? of course I will have to change my old good G3 233 to a G4.. Am I right? whaT ARE THE BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS USING fIREWIRE WITH pt? tHANKS FOR THE INFO

[rtcstudio]

Alecio,

Ultra SCSI removeable drives are probably a bit more "industry standard" as far as having a portable method of taking your project from studio to studio, although I think that is changing rapidly in favor of the faster "pro" firewire drives.

I used Ultra SCSI for three years. I have two Rorke Data Systems removeable racks, one with four bays, one with one bay and a SONY AIT-I tape backup. I also have a two bay GLYPH rack. I have four 9 gig, and three 18 gig Cheetah drives in trays. So I know about Ultra SCSI.

The Ultra SCSI is still faster at moving info from the drive to the computer and vice versa than Firewire. If you go by the book you shouldn't be able to get as many tracks with Firewire as you can with SCSI. But in the real world I haven't found that to be the case.

I decided, mainly influenced by the DRASTIC price differential between Firewire and SCSI, to try Firewire. My research told me to make sure I had Oxford 911 chipsets in all my Firewire drives. The place I went to for all my Firewire hardware was Granite Digital. Their website is www.scsipro.com and there you will find all sorts of enclosures, cables etc. You can use bays with removeable trays to house your firewire drives and have a portable system just like ULTRA SCSI.

The system I use now is a Magma 4 slot chassis which holds my Mix core card and three Mix cards. In this I mounted one removeable firewire bay, and two fixed firewire drives. I used IBM Deskstar 60 gig drives, the Oxford 911 firewire bridges and high resolution cables from Granite Digital. These three drives are simply daisy chained together, and then connected to either the firewire port on my Titanium Powerbook, or one of the firewire ports on my G4/733. I'm using ProTools 5.1 on both computers, with Mac OS 9.2. I definitely saw an improvement in the firewire use when I switched to Mac OS 9.2, I don't know why.

I have completed the last three projects I have worked on with this system with no failures. My sessions usually run 60 to 75 audio tracks (sometimes using voice sharing of course) with lots of plugins and usually using up all 256 TDM connections. I do a lot of live concerts, so my sessions are not just the length of one song, but an entire concert, and usually a lot of outtakes and re-takes. I can still go from studio to studio for overdubs etc., using a portable external removeable Firewire enclosure, again from Granite Digital.

I'll still keep a couple of bays of Ultra SCSI for compatiblility. But I'm using firewire from now on. The drives are a third or less the price of SCSI.

Hope that helps.

[advid]

Dear rtcstudio,

Is there any delay when you start recording or playing back the tracks ? It sounds that the firewired HD works like the LVD or Ultra drives. Is there any differences between them that you'd experienced ?
According to the info on Digi's web site, when we upgraded to PT HD, we can get 64 tracks at 96K using 4 LVD dirves.

Should we still go and get Firewire to run PT HD at 96K and say for 64 tracks..is that possible ?

[rtcstudio]

Advid,

If I have a lot of edits, and in the beginning stages and up to the mix I usually do, there can be a delay of around two seconds on a big session. This delay doesn't bother me a bit, I used to wait 5 times that to lock up 2" machines and ADATS. But remember, my sessions are LONG. The last session I did had the final edited concert, plus the outtakes from another concert, plus some tracks from a rehearsal in it. The final concert is 70 minutes (some tracks are continuous, most are edited like the drum tracks for instance) and additional audio makes the total length of my sessions sometimes as long as 4 hours. I have the DAE playback buffer set to level 4, with audio spread across at least two firewire drives. Now, if I compact the session and duplicate all my tracks, getting rid of fade files and all edits, turn off Quick Punch, the session response is much quicker.

BUT I have heard other Firewire users say that on a typical use on a session of around normal song length, like less than five minutes, that they can get 64 tracks going just fine, no delays on Mix Plus, and only ONE firewire drive. I can't stress enough the importance to use FAST firewire 7200 RPM drives with the new Oxford 911 chipsets.

On PT HD I just don't know. At 96K you'll be using twice the drive space (I assume) as at 48K. So you'll just have to try it. Firewire drives are so cheap compared to Ultra SCSI ones that it would be worth the experiment to me. I haven't made the upgrade yet, so I don't know. Perhaps there are other HD users out there who have tried this. My understanding also is that my MAGMA four slot will have to be upgraded because its bus is only 32 bit, and the new HD cards require 64 bit architechture.

[Alécio Costa]

well, i think i will stay with scsri drives or an internal IDE form IBM, for example, Thanks for all the comments again friends!

[JLEpperson]

Can you mix firewire drives with scsi? I use the atto card with 4 18Gig drives. I need more so, I thought maybe add a firewire drive.
Thanks