Hard Drives to get for Audio fast enough for 48 tracks?

[DBorgers]

This is my first post here. I've spent 2 days online trying to find answers tomy situation. Man, it's a jungle out there as far as anything definitive.

I'm a writer/producer here in Nashville.

My question is based around the system I have at home for recording/overdubbing my projects:

G4 FW800 1.42ghz dual
2 gig ram
Maxtor ATA133 130 gig (on the internal ATA100 bus)
IBM ATA100 60 gig (on the internal ATA100 bus)
2 Cheetah UltraSCSI drives and Adaptec PowerDomain 29160N PCI card
OXX 10.3.9
Cubase SX3
PCI-324 and 2408 MK2
UAD-1 Studio Pak x 1 (buying a 2nd UAD card this week)

Currently, I have 2 UltraSCSI drives via Adaptec PowerDomain 29160N - one for samples and one for audio in current projects. Cubase is on the System Disk.

As Adaptec no longer support drivers beyond Mac OX 10.3.9 and I'm moving to Tiger 10.4.6 and so I need to get new hard drives or a new SCSI card for my audio drives. With SCSI on it's way out I think I need to change the hard drives for my audio - especially since the ATA100's and SATA's are so dollar friendly per gigabyte.

I use VSTi's quite a bit, The Grand, Battery, Reason, Groove Agent, Core Drummer, etc.

HERE'S MY QUESTION = Will Firewire 800 be suffiicient for audio drives? Are ATA100 7200rpm drives enough? I only record 2-8 tracks at a time max, but use all 24 channels of bus out via PCI-324 to my O2R via ADAT optical with 24-48 tracks of audio running at the same time - sometimes I print VSTi's.

What would be your recommendations for new drives for recording audio. Firewire 800?, Firewire 800 RAID (2 drives)?, SATA?, or are ATA100 drives fast enough at 7200rpms for that many tracks?

A know SATA (with a PCI card) is an option, but if I can free up another PCI slot by not having to go the PCI SATA card route to free up PCI bandwidth for my PCI-324 and UAD cards I'd rather do that.

Any experience anyone can share about performance of FW800 and ATA100 drives in DAW use would be very helpful and appreciated If I have to I'll get SATA, but if Firewire800 or a Firewire800 2 disk RAID setup would be enough I'd rather do that. Thanks all

Danny Borgers

[twistedtom]

I went u-scsi but I am not using it now, I do not do a lot of high track projects but it seems the new 7200's are fast enough, alot of people here use them with higher track counts than 48. As long as you have a 2nd drive just for audio.

[DBorgers]

Thanks for the response. It's good to know that ATA 100 will work. I've always had at least two additional drives for audio.

I think I'll make the Maxtor 120 gig 133 that came with the G4 FW800 1.42 the audio drive and the 60 gig the system drive. Then I can use the two ATA66 slots internally for storage as well as Firewire drives.

After I get the 10.4.6 OSX set up and configure the drives I'll post on the performance.

Thanks again

[giles117]

Likewise, I have mixed 72 track 48/24 songs with an ATA133 Drive on an ATA100 interface on as lowly as a G4.

Also, for your computer, here was my setup (I had a MDD G4)

ata 66 Master: System drive.
ata 66 Slave: Samples
ATA100 Master: Audio Drive
ATA 100 Slave: Samples

This config gave me full steam ahead when mixing. Of Course all samples were printed as mix ready audio files (No Streaming of sample data)

You do not want the system drive on the ata100 Bus along with the Main Audio Drive. These are shared busses. NOT LIKE SCSI. Basically meaning when the computer is talking to the master the slave cant be heard and vice versa.

SCSI was full communication with any drive at anytime. No Waiting. ATA/IDE is not as friendly

[DBorgers]

Giles, thanks man

I'm a little confused about Master/Slave

If I have samples on either bus (like Battery drums or The Grand) that it won't play the samples at the same time either my System Drive or my Audio Drive are working? That would eliminate using either 2nd drive on either bus wouldn't it in real time?

Thanks again in advance for your response.