ATTO vs. Adaptec - which is better and why is atto so expensive??

[VanEdge]

i'm a PC guy primarily, but i have a G4 on the way for my 001.

can someone tell me why atto scsi cards are so damned expensive?

what's the difference between the atto and adaptec cards that digi recommends???

really - in a practical sense - as long as the scsi drive is 10k rpm, what's the big deal about the pci card??

[0dbfs]

Here's my experience with the Digi 001 and SCSI:
I had originally purchased an ATTO SCSI card and a Seagate Barracuda SCSI drive to go with my Digi 001. I can't remember the exact model of the ATTO card, but it was one down from the top of the line model.

This setup was trouble right from the beginning. I would get PCI bus to busy errors immediately upon trying to record. After talking with the tech from MacGurus (I recommend buying from them if you are going to buy a SCSI drive. It might cost a little more, but the support is great--especially for ProTools users) I found that the solution was to limit the transfer rate on the card to something like 10MBps or less (can't remember the exact number.)

To make a long story short, I returned the ATTO card and the SCSI Barracuda drive and bought an ATA Barracuda drive for much less money. What good is a high powered SCSI adapter and drive if you can only run it at a fraction of its potential speed? I haven't had ProTools give me any errors related to the drive, since.

So, spend more money and have more problems going SCSI or spend less money and have less problems with an ATA drive.

Note, however, that your mileage may vary--especially with a newer G4 with AGP graphics. I had my 001 installed in a friends G4/AGP for awhile and the ATTO SCSI card was much better behaved there.

[Frank S]

Not to be contrarian, but my ATTO express dual PCI U2W card has performed flawlessly right from the beginnning on my sawtooth G4. No problems whatsoever. Now I don't know why its so much more expensive.

[Gulliver]

Once again, speed is not the reason SCSI is better than IDE for Pro Tools. The main advantage is the availability of drives with much faster access time. 8ms for IDE's best, 4ms for SCSI's best.

If there are a lot of edits on 24 tracks, the faster access time of SCSI will be able to get to them faster than IDE. This may be more important in 64 track TDM systems.

ATTO cards are expensive because they are made in the US as a specialty item. They are not a mass produced commodity item made over seas like the Adaptec cards, which are in millions of the PC servers throughout the world. ATTO cards are the standard for audio and video, just like Apple.

[ThomCat]

I had similar results to both those from 0dbfs and Frank S. My Mac clone/ATTO/Digi 001 combination was death, but problems are gone now that I went to a new G4. In fact I was basically dead in the water with my ATTO card and old G3-upgraded Powercenter Pro for about 4 months once I went to the Digi 001. I was limited either to tracking or to 8-tracks-or-less submixing, and that was at the expense of many PCI bus errors. My old 16 bit card (Audiowerk8) didn't have these problems (it had enough other problems for me to upgrade to a 001 and never look back, though). It was my own fault, as the Digi 001 was never authorized to work on anything less than a blue&white G3.

The SCSI/PCI bus errors was the deciding factor in my upgrading to a G4, but I still use my legacy ATTO card and SCSI drives...now error free. I have mixed 44 tracks to 2 on a single audio drive without even breathing hard on my new setup and once ran 25 Waves/Logic plug-ins simultaneously before choking the CPU. But if I was starting from scratch I think I would go ATA all the way.

SCSI blows. I have SCSI drives that I still can't seem to hook up correctly any more that have half-finished projects on them that I can't get to (thankfully not for clients).

Back to the subject, what's not been mentioned here is the one slight advantage an ATTO card may have over cheaper cards (or ATA for that matter). What led me to buy an ATTO card was partly the claim that it supposedly takes a load off the CPU to some extent that would not happen with the cheaper cards. I can't really verify that that is the case, but it might be something to investigate. Of course with the new G4's and dual processing arriving the relatively tiny gains here no longer justify the higher price of a sophisticated card...especially one that you have to cripple down to much slower speeds to keep the Digi hardware/drivers happy. An ATTO card will burst to 320 (both busses) but Digi can't handle anything over 10MB/s, so 0dbfs's point is well taken.

ATTO cards are terrific for video production and the high price tag is because they are designed with high throughput for video and prepress applications. But multi-track audio doesn't need a hard drive bus with throughput, it needs hard drives with quick seek times (you are right about 10k spindle speeds), so an ATTO card is very likely overkill (wish I'd known that $280 ago...by the time I got it all figured out it was way too late to return the ATTO card).

Ironically enough, any $50 SCSI-2 card could theoretically provide enough throughput for 75 simultaneous tracks of 44.1/24 bit audio (8MB per minute times 75 tracks divided by 60 seconds = 10 MB/s), but of course many older Macs have SCSI busses that can only handle half that. Also, ATTO's tech support is so brain-dead it's nearly non-existent. I found all my answers right here on the DUC.

Go 7200 rpm ATA and G4, and load up the ram slots. Screw SCSI and the horse it rode in on.

[[email protected]]

I just bought the Atto EPCI-DC-000
( $280.00 ) the one Digi supports, so far so good. Great tech support. Check it out... http://www.us.buy.com/retail/product...096535&loc=101