Advice on using eSATA drives most effectively?

[wolfetho]

CompUSA was running a sale on hard drives and I bought 2 SATA drives with a controller card. One was external 250 GB. and the other was an Internal 160 GB.I'm thinking about buying an external SATA case an putting the internal SATA inside that. The controller card is for the external SATA drive and has two ports. I have a G4 Dual 1.25 mhz w/ 2GB RAM, and DP 5.1.

I'm doing a lot of Orchestral scoring using VSL VI and Kontakt 2 w/ the VSL library.Which would be better- to move the VSL samples onto the new
SATA drives?They are currently on my internal ATA drives (66, 133 mhz buss speeds.) The other option would be to record my audio tracks on the SATA drives and leave the samples on the internal ATA drives..

I'm thinking it would be best do the streaming of samples off of the SATA drives, and record my audio tracks on one of the free internal ATA drives.
Is this correct? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tom

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

It might be nice if you can get another 250gig external and do a Raid type 0 with the two 250gig drives. You'll get some serious throughput! <grin>

[HCMarkus]

I'm thinking it would be best do the streaming of samples off of the SATA drives, and record my audio tracks on one of the free internal ATA drives.

Sounds like a good approach. OWC has a simple two-drive SATA Case for $80. I have two Raptors in mine. They carry BFD, Ivory and Stylus and work very nicely. No slow disc messages anymore for Ivory, and no clicks or pops with BFD.

Of course, if your projects involve huge numbers of track and nominal VI useage, you may want to reverse things and put your audio on the SATA.

[Shooshie]

I've tried making a diagram to post here in the forum which would show the busses, drives, and logical arrangements for distribution of files, but I get bogged down in the possibilities. I guess I should just choose one possibility and finish the picture, and hope that it's clear enough for people to extrapolate the idea to their own setup. The logic is basically this:

Give the most bandwidth to the most reads.

We're not just talking about capacity, but the whole chain from drive head to CPU. In the case of your SATA controller card, you've got to determine the speed of your card and whether it sucks up bandwidth from any other PCI bus-related item. PCI busses are pretty fast, but prior to PCIe, we were taxing them pretty far when using a PCI audio interface (MOTU 192HD, for instance) with a PCI Firewire or other hard drive controller card. If it's one of the NEW PCI slots, then you've got a lot more bandwidth to deal with.

That's why it gets complicated. You have to figure out where YOUR capacities are, and how to deliver the greatest bandwidth to your streaming VIs. It's going to be a little bit different for each person's system.

The best way to go about this, IMO, is to use System Profiler to trace your hardware busses and capacities. It will give you all the info you need to determine where you've got room, and what is using that bandwidth. Then go through a process of imagining a typical Digital Performer session. Imagine which VIs are playing at once. You don't want any single drive trying to read multiple VIs unless they're really low-throughput. Ivory, for example, must have a drive of its own, and it really should be a 10K rpm drive.

The questions to ask:
1) Where are the bottlenecks?
--a) at the drive head? (Ivory, 80-track audio files)
--b) at the drive bus? (Firewire?, USB?)
--c) at the PCI card? (any hard drive controller + audio interface cards)
--d) at the system bus? (G4, Powerbook)
2) Where are the files?
--a) streaming VIs
--b) system, apps
--c) DP files and their audio files

Your new SATA drive would be fast, but it bites a serious chunk out of the PCI controller of your old G4. Sure, the PCI bus has a lot of bandwidth, but it just depends on how you are using that. Do you have PCI audio interfaces? USB-2 or Firewire-800 cards?

That's my 2 cents worth.

Shooshie

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

Yaaa. What he said! : ) Glad to see ya Shooshie...

[wolfetho]

Thanks everyone for your help.

Shoosie:

In answer to your question- Yes, I already have 3 PCI slots being used on my G4.
UAD-1=1
TC Powercore =1
Echo Layla 3G=1

Also, another thing which I didn't mention before- One eSATA drive is
SATA I-( came with PCI controller card) 250 GB., The other drive is internal SATA II 160 GB. I just bought a SATA case for this drive today.

Thanks again for your help:

Tom

[papageno]

I have a G4 Dual 1.25 mhz

Check the speed of your PCI bus. As far as I remember, most G4-s had a PCI bus with less bandwith than SATA I.

[greymantle]

I just discovered www.wiebetech.com

They make a variety of "drive docks" for both IDE and ATA drives. They are a tiny (match box size adapter) and provide Firewire 4 and 8, USB 1 and 2 bridges (with drive power supply) that allow you connect an internal (naked) drive to your data chain.

They run from about 100 bucks to about 180 depending on bus.

OWC has 300 GB internal SATA's for 100 bucks.

I just got two mini USBDocks (one for studio, one for home) and I just swap out the drives for back-up and portablilty to and from. They provide a protective aluminum plate to cover the circuit board of the drive.

It's a very cheap, very fast and flexible solution to lots of storage.

Check it out, It kicks!
Let me know what you think.
(And no, I don't work there).

grey

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

I bought some enclosures from TransInternation but I wish I had bought some that were swappable. Here's some that I think have a lot of potential and some of them are rackmountable:

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/p ... -8rack.htm

[greymantle]

Wow.

You're definitely a trouble maker. I think I have to get the 1U rack mount. That is definitely cool.

grey

[Eleventh Hour Sound]

<Laughing>

I know, when I saw them I thought they were amazing!

Wow.

You're definitely a trouble maker. I think I have to get the 1U rack mount. That is definitely cool.

grey