Recording Hard Drive

[Davidwilson]

I have a G5 Dual 2.7Ghz PPC with FW400,800 and wondering the best type of Hard to record audio to.

Running PTHD 8 with OSX10.5.8 sessions are 24/88.

I have always used an external FW400 with my previous G4 but wondering if the newer SATA drives may be ok to record to internally.

Also what size drive is best. Most drives no seem around the 500G at minimum. I have never used more that 80G previously being told smaller drives are better.

[crizdee]

Originally Posted by Davidwilson

I have a G5 Dual 2.7Ghz PPC with FW400,800 and wondering the best type of Hard to record audio to.

Running PTHD 8 with OSX10.5.8 sessions are 24/88.

I have always used an external FW400 with my previous G4 but wondering if the newer SATA drives may be ok to record to internally.

Also what size drive is best. Most drives no seem around the 500G at minimum. I have never used more that 80G previously being told smaller drives are better.

Hi,

I'm not 100% sure but does the PPC have SATA drives? i think they are the earlier standard IDE drives. A separate internal drive would be better than an external firewire. and a 1TB drive should work fine. avoid any green low energy drives as they run slower.


Chris

[Davidwilson]

Yes the G5 PPC has SATA drives.

[D'Animation]

click on the apple in the top left corner - about this mac - then under hardware see if you've got Serial-ATA listed was how I started. I upgraded drives in some old old G5/G4 macs at work and had to dig deeper though - their is a website somewhere which has a complete list of models and specs going back to G4s which was useful. Turns out 1 mac was IDE/PATA, the other was SATA so no hard and fast rule unfortunately. Having said that, going by the processor only a dual 2.7Ghz sounds newer than the sata capable G5 here

EDIT - guess you got your answer - you posted while I was writing!

[Davidwilson]

Does Avid have any recommendation as to internal SATA Hard Disk size for recording Audio.

[BaileyBass]

Originally Posted by Davidwilson

Does Avid have any recommendation as to internal SATA Hard Disk size for recording Audio.

Using 1tb Seagate (barracudas, I think) working fine on the same machine... eSata. sb

[Lumin]

I would highly recommend these WD VelociRaptor 10K RPM drives.

[Davidwilson]

These say SATAII. Are they compatible with SATA which is what my G5 is compatible with?

[drenkrom]

The SATA inside G5's is SATA-1.5G (SATA-I). The later revisions are SATA-3G (SATA-II) and SATA-6G. Every SATA standard is backwards-compatible on both the drive and interface end, so you should be able to plug pretty much any SATA device into any SATA port and it should run at the fastest speed your slower device can handle.

Any SATA drive will make a good recording drive compared to FW400. Stay away from "green" drives or anything marketed as being "eco-friendly". They spin down at the slightest pause in activity and take a second or two to spin back up all the time. 10K RPM drives have higher throughputs but cost quite a bit more than 7200RPM drives. If you intend on running high track counts, it could be a good investment, but if you were running your sessions off FW400 you probably don't really need a 10K drive.

Size doesn't really matter (and for hard drives, it's actually true). In most instances, it's better to use a small portion of a large drive than the contrary. I don't know where the audio-folk-legend of smaller drives being better comes from but I've heard it many times. Pretty much all HDD benchmarks say the exact opposite. Inside a same product line, the bigger drives score (marginally) better.

HDD choice for audio is less critical than it was even only a few years ago. If you go with the main model line of recognized manufacturers (WD Caviar Black, Seagate Barracuda, Hitachi Spinpoint...) you should have no worries.

IHTH

[Davidwilson]

Thanks some good info there.