Firewire Drive vs. SCSI Drive

[scoobdaproduca]

I need an honest opinion from my fellow Pro Tools users out there. Which are the better overall drives: the Digidesign Firewire Drives or the SCSI Drives. I mean in reference to speed, track count capabilities and ease of operation. Thanks in advance.

Signed Desperately Seeking Advice [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[roberts]

We have about 10 Firewire drives and about 12 SCSI drives. The Ultra 320 SCSI drives are extremley fast 128 tracks a few edits and they will still work. A firewire drive could not keep up at all with this performance. If you need lots of edits (Sessions 1.5 MB or higher) I had a session that was 18 MB I needed to split it up on 2 Ultra 320 drives one on each channel to get it to work. If your tracking a band with more than 20 Record tracks at once you need SCSI.

[ashdot]

We are now on our 5th PT HD album, using only firewire drives.

Our standard sample rate is 88.2, using 2 80Gb FW drives per project, and a 120Gb FW drive for backup.

Each album started with a live recording of 18 tracks and the average total track count per song is 40.

There are a lot of edits, heavy beat detective work and not a glitch.

Izhar

[scoobdaproduca]

Thank you for you input. It really helps me out.

[blairl]

Originally posted by ashdot:
Our standard sample rate is 88.2, using 2 80Gb FW drives per project, and a 120Gb FW drive for backup.

Each album started with a live recording of 18 tracks and the average total track count per song is 40.

There are a lot of edits, heavy beat detective work and not a glitch.

Izhar

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">When you say you have 2 drives and 40 tracks, do you spread the tracks between the 2 drives, or do the 40 tracks all play off of one hard drive?

[doug_hti]

I've been working with three songs over the last 3 weeks that have about 40-50 tracks at 96k. Some of the drums are beat detectived. Vocal stacks have tons of edits....All one drive.

Performance wise, the SCSI protocol can definately out perform FW by a solid amount. However, I believe that FW is much easier to manage for audio. Having been around SCSI setups and arrays, as well as Fibre setups, it's hard to go wrong with FW. Also ATA drives are so much cheaper, you can use the actual drive as one form of backup when your done, along with another type of media.

[ashdot]

When you say you have 2 drives and 40 tracks, do you spread the tracks between the 2 drives, or do the 40 tracks all play off of one hard drive?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">When recording the live tracks, we spread the tracks between the two drives, but during overdubs more tracks are recorded to the 1st drive (the default drive for the session) because we usually forget to assign the new tracks to the 2nd drive.
We end up having at least 25 tracks on drive 1 which is no problem. We/ve played over 35 tracks at 88.2 off of one FW drive with no problems.

FW is so much easier and feels safer than the scsi hell we used to go thru although It does feel a little more processor intensive.

[jaffaman]

I've recorded about thirty albums and many other TV projects etc since going HD3 last year - using internal ATA IBM drives (100Gig) and archiving off onto Firewire. Works a treat. I spent ten years in SCSI hell and am very glad to be rid of them!

[dave-G]

Firewire 800 looks promising, too. Shipping on new Macs along with "old" firewire.

http://www.apple.com/firewire/