RE: Quantum Atlas Drives (related to topic in the General Information Forum)

[Disco_Doctor]

I can say that the performance loss occurs under pretty stressful conditions, so it wouldn't surprise me too much if you haven't had any problems...I would ask you, though, to let me know of any performance-loss situations you might encounter that seem out of the ordinary...if you have nothing but great experiences, let me know that as well. It could help to characterize the "severity" of the problem -- is it a real-world issue, or just academic?

I'm doing six tracks on an album right now and I have four Quantum Atlas IV 7200rpm 9GB drives, and two Quantum Viking II 4.5GB drives dedicated to this project. All of the sessions have between 60-80 tracks, tons of edits, plugins, etc...performance has been nothing but excellent. Most of the songs (all but two as far as I can recall right now) are only spread across two drives. That level of performance easily surpasses what is in Digi's recommendations for track count per drive.

System:

Four Quantum Atlast IV's 9GB drives, two Quantum Viking II 4.5GB drives, two 18GB 10K Cheetahs in Glyph. Adaptec 2940UW with v4.1 firmware, v5.1 Powerdomain control panel. (Yes, all those drives are on the 2940UW buss with no performance loss due to disconnect/reconnect or SCSI cable length issues. I use top of the line SCSI cabling available at www.scsipro.com. I think Digidesign should recommend this company's products in their compatibility specs and stress the absolute importance of super-hi-fi SCSI cables.)

PowerTower Pro 225 with Newertech G3/300. MacOS 8.5.1. Mix+, 4 vintage farms, SampleCell II, Magma chassis.

DAE buffer typically set to 2, unless the edits are out of control - then I go to 4 during mixing.

[Steve Rosenthal]

Thanks!



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--Steve Rosenthal, Digidesign ETS