FW Drive decisions

[Lumin]

Looking into getting FW800 drives for my HD3-X and G5 setup.
Don't have much experience with these drives.
What would some of you users recommend?
Any prefered brands? Thanx

[CPettigrew]

I have two: OWC drives with the 922 chip, and the Granite Digital FW800 hot-swap cases. The OWC drives read a little faster, and the Granite Digital case (using WD drives with 8 meg cache) write a little faster. But the difference is minute.

Craig

[Lee Blaske]

Looking into getting FW800 drives for my HD3-X and G5 setup.

Check the compatibility documents. Digidesign does not support FW800 with PT 6.2.3 or 6.4.

The MOSR site has had a report that FW800 will be greatly improved on the next generation of G5's. Perhaps it'll be a good option then.

Lee Blaske

[SFXPost]

Any perfered brands that run QUIETLY?

[Brad Cobb]

My Favorite:

http://www.storcase.com/DataSilo/ds321.asp

[Ploch Klaus]

I am using LaCie drives (have 6 250GB drives) - they work great so far (since 4 weeks or so). There advantage is: they have a FW 800, a FW 400 and (i do not use this) USB 2.0. Connected via FW 400 they work perfect (i do not have a FW 800 or USB 2.0 on my current mac) - if you need more than one drive at once (i do) several drives can be interconnected by FW 800 and the first one is connected via FW 400 to the mac - dont know if that is an advantage but it works - in ProTools (6.4) and LogicPro...
I just tried the track-count - which is unbeliefable - 128 tracks from one drive did work (no edits - just playback long files - i did that just to see where the limit is...) on 16bit 48 kHz files. Shurely with lots of edits this will not work - but may give you an idea that these drives are fast (formated of course with OS-X disk-util)

[Ploch Klaus]

I forgot something: the drives are also quite silent - no vents. But they do get quite hot if you put one on top of the other. Just dont do that... put them not too near to each other

[LFOT]

Is anyone using the new EZQUEST Pro Audio drives (supposedly approved by Digi)?
ezq drives

(the following is with exception to FW800 drives)

EZQuest drives have worked fine for me. I've used just about everything (Lacie, EZQuest, Quantegy, Maxtor, etc...) and I would put them in the category of the Quantegy drives. You don't get the neato case and all, but you do get an internal power supply. That's a very nice feature if you are going from location to location and all you have to bring along is an IEC and a FW cable. Or, if you don't have those, you can probably still get working because most people have those items (and not your proprietary external power supply).

Seems petty, but it's little problems like that that actually keep sessions from starting more than the performance of one drive over another.

Added note:
Lacie drives work fine... most of the time. Hate the external power supply though. Very consumer.
EZQuest is way cool.
Quantegy drives are the best, but cost way too much.

[PMoshay]

i just got a LaCie Extreme 250gig (FW800/FW400) and tried the FW800 option on my laptop 17" w/LE and it worked ok, but no better than FW400 (and FW400 seemed more stable).
I'm hoping that Digi optimizes PT to work better with FW800.........seems like a no brainer.

[A1]

OWC Mercury Drives are pretty reliable and cheaper compared to many others.
Got mine couple of weeks ago works perfect, no problems so far.