what's the word on SATA drives with ProTools?

[nonsqtr]

SATA drives seem to be very cheap these days, and they have the added benefit that on many platforms, they're "seen" as SCSI drives.

Is there any scuttlebutt on SATA drives, in relation to ProTools? Performance-wise, or in relation to the application itself?

[MDog]

The "scuttlebutt " is that SATA drives work great in Pro Tools.

[M-ManLA]

Are you telling me you don't have a SATA Drive yet? Dude buy one. NOW. For your system drive, you will want a WD Raptor SATA150 (Get the 74GB or 150GB), because it is FAST (10,000 RPM). As for your Recording drives, get a WD or Seagate (I personally think WD is better). You can get a 750GB for under $200. That is a bargin.

[stanonbass]

I bought a 320 gig Seagate barracuda for an internal. Only 7200 rpm 16 mb cache internal.

It seems to run fine. No errors. I can go 16 at once forever without any hiccups. Only 109 plus tax at compusa. Cant beat it.

Is 10000 RPM really needed? Those drives are nice but there a hundred bucks more and less space.

[nonsqtr]

Yes, Maxtor here, 500 Gigs for 160 bucks, so I got a few of 'em just in case.

Let me ask you guys a question - I just noticed by inspecting a Sandra report, that my SATA drive, in its hardware configuration, "registers" (or whatever Sandra is reporting for SATA - it's the equivalent of the PCI configuration registers for those devices) is reporting its "power-saving spin-down" as being ENABLED.

I think, I've don't everything I can via the BIOS and Windows, to turn off all the power-saving stuff, but maybe there's a few things I missed, and I HAVE been noticing some strange sounds coming out of the machine when I press play, and it DOES take a long time to start, so... I'm wondering, is there a way to manually get into the hardware configuration of one of these drives, and turn off whatever bit needs to be turned off in the settings?

*Will Sandra edit the drive configuration settings, or just report them? Or, what other tool should I be using for this purpose?)

[M-ManLA]

That is in software. Right-click your desktop and go to the Properties, then screensaver tab, then click on the Power button. There you can turn off the HDD spindowns.

[rossi68]

Are you telling me you don't have a SATA Drive yet? Dude buy one. NOW. For your system drive, you will want a WD Raptor SATA150 (Get the 74GB or 150GB), because it is FAST (10,000 RPM). As for your Recording drives, get a WD or Seagate (I personally think WD is better). You can get a 750GB for under $200. That is a bargin.

Just remember that raptors runs HOT
Turn up the fan

[nonsqtr]

That is in software. Right-click your desktop and go to the Properties, then screensaver tab, then click on the Power button. There you can turn off the HDD spindowns.

Thanks!

And yes, all my SATA drives run (very?) hot, so airflow is probably a consideration.

One thing I found, that deserves mention, is an ENCLOSURE for a SATA drive - it's just a box, without a drive in it, but with all the interface electronics already built-in, for firewire, USB, and downstream SATA. So basically, you just pop in a SATA drive of your choice, and away we go.

This enclosure is called "CoolMax" (made in China, of course - and doubly funny 'cause it runs a little "hot" most of the time)....

But the nice thing about this is, I can take it to my M-Powered on the laptop, and run it as a firewire drive, and then unplug it and take it over to the HD3, and run it as a USB-2 (which works just fine on a dedicated port - USB-2 is even rated 20$ faster than firewire).

This method is also SUPERB for things like BFD, you can take all those gigabytes of samples, and put 'em all on a portable drive that you can move from machine to machine, and BFD "likes" to have a separate drive anyway (ie separate from the ProTools audio drive), so.....

In many ways, this is quite the perfect solution. Works great for backups too.

At price per gig, these SATA drives are a real steal lately. Spend the extra five bucks on a good fan.