10,000 RPM Drives

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 2:57 pm

I'm about ready to add another 10k eSATA enclosure. I'm really pleased with the performance.

dtiger · Post by **dtiger** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 3:19 pm

Chris, I'm late to this but my experiences are in sync with everyone else - the raptors are great and with 3 of them in a Mac Pro the whole thing is still quieter than my G5. I think getting an external one for video via firewire is overkill though, I would go for a bigger drive in that case (I only use mine internally for samples and audio recording). Newegg sells "OEM" versions which is just the same drive without the retail box so you can save dough. Good luck!

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 3:26 pm

I thought the OEM version was the drive without the enclosure?

Or is that what you meant by "box", vs. the company's shipping box?

I have been afraid to buy an OEM drive for this reason, as I felt it was ambiguous given the photos on the website.

Our expert here recommends against going to the extreme of buying a drive that is not enclosed, due to potential for contaminants entering the drive before it is sealed.

This is hard to describe in words without visuals, due to alternate and contextual meanings of words. Is it clear what I mean by "open" and "unsealed"?

dtiger · Post by **dtiger** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:07 pm

I just meant the retail box, the cardboard thing with the pics. I asked the sales guy when I bought mine and he confirmed that I'd be getting the same drive, just no pretty box or instructions. But you're right, looking at the website most of the drives look like they belong in an external enclosure (or are they just showing you how cool their drives look on the inside?!!). Probably need to give 'em a ring, just to be sure, sorry I'm not an authority on this!

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 2:45 pm

Thanks for the clarification. I was hoping that was all they meant, was the lack of a retail box. I wasn't confident enough of my wording before to pose the question directly to them, but now with your clarification, when next I order a drive, I will look at the OEM option and ask them to verify it is the same except lacking the retail box.

HCMarkus · Post by **HCMarkus** » Thu Oct 18, 2007 9:46 pm

OEM is fine as long as you don't need the Windows driver CD

OEM drives ship in very good packaging, no screws for installing, no cables, but most cases come with the screws and cables anyway.

I got my last Firewire case from New Egg for $6.05 after rebate. Threw a $49.95 250 gig drive on sale from Fry's inside for backup chores. Took about 7 minutes to build. Formatted with a few partitions for convenience. Don't know if the Firewire bridge chip is Oxford, but for backup, who cares?

p.pan · Post by **p.pan** » Fri Oct 19, 2007 6:47 am

First I just want to say thank you for the Unicornation Forum.

I use DP 4.61 on G5 1.8 dual with 3.5G on 10.3.9
With 2 Internal Hardrive each 150G

I am very interrest about to put PCI card Esata Wich One???
And to put 3xWD Raptor 10K 150G each on the PCI port.

Its Possible???

Thanks again

Eleventh Hour Sound · Fri Oct 19, 2007 12:41 pm

I use a 10k Raptor(150G) for the boot drive on my G5 Quad and have loved it. It's really fast, and I don't find it to be any louder than my other drives.

I have another Raptor that is an exact clone of the first one in it's last known good working state) so that (God forbid) if there's a problem either hardware or software I can reboot from it and be right where I left off.

For streaming, I'm using 2 Maxtor Maxline III 300GB 7V300F0 raided together.

For DP Audio, I'm using another 2 Maxtor Maxline III 300GB 7V300F0 raided together.

For backup, I just use inexpensive, bare IDE drives in a FireWire enclosure.

Depending on the type of RAID you're using, hard drive performance may decrease as the drive gets full, so it's important to keep plenty of free space....

There's a great article, testing and reviews at Amug.org

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/ ... r/7H500F0/

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Fri Oct 19, 2007 12:59 pm

p.pan wrote:First I just want to say thank you for the Unicornation Forum.

I use DP 4.61 on G5 1.8 dual with 3.5G on 10.3.9
With 2 Internal Hardrive each 150G

I am very interrest about to put PCI card Esata Wich One???
And to put 3xWD Raptor 10K 150G each on the PCI port.

Its Possible???

Thanks again

Hey p.pan:

Yes, it's possible, but the benefit of using a eSATA host card is that you could put the three drives in an enclosue (or four, or five). There are cards that support up to 20 drives this way: four ports connected to four drive enclosures holding five drives each. Of course, you could also use smaller drive enclosures for each port as well. Because the card is on one PCI slot, there's no bus advantage to putting three different individual drives on their own port because the entire card folds the four ports into one PCI bus.

It would be beneficial, however, to put the eSATA host card on the one slot in your computer that doesn't share a bus. Some G5s have slots in which two of them share a bus and one slot that is independent. (I think the 1.8 has 1 slot on a 133Mhz bus and two slots sharing a 100 Mhz bus.)

This card from Sonnet would be a great choice- and it has EIGHT ports, up to 300MB/sec per port:

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo-x_esata8.html

One advantage is that it's eSATA II which is faster than eSATA I. It's only a matter of having a proper eSATA II enclosure and eSATA II cable (which is different than those used for eSATA I).

spirit · Post by **spirit** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 2:45 pm

If one is NOT streaming samples from disk is there any real time advantage in using a seperate drive for sample libraries (i.e. Kontakt with DFD off)?

Even with a separate 10k drive for samples, doesn't diskstreaming samples still consume a considerably larger chunk of CPU than using a separate gigastudio computer?

Doesn't using a PCI/SATA card consume a big chunk of PCI bandwidth, so if one has a lot of PCI cards (digidesign, UAD etc.) that the use of a PCI/SATA card could very possibly bottleneck the system's performance at the PCI level?

Thanks.

p.pan · Post by **p.pan** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 8:43 pm

Hello,

I use DP 4.61 on a G5 dual 1.8, 3.5G Ram
on Mac Os X.3.9
(G5 with the 8 Ram Ports) PCIx
With 2 internal Hard drive 150G

828 MKII
TC powercore firewire
UAd 1 Studio Pack
Mach five 1.2
Styllus RMX
Ethno

I would like to take Two Raptor 150 G 10k
For sampling and the VIs.

which SATA PCIx card work nice????

I see the sonnet look nice some body have feedback???

Thanks for your reply.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:19 pm

spirit wrote:If one is NOT streaming samples from disk is there any real time advantage in using a seperate drive for sample libraries (i.e. Kontakt with DFD off)?

Even with a separate 10k drive for samples, doesn't diskstreaming samples still consume a considerably larger chunk of CPU than using a separate gigastudio computer?

Doesn't using a PCI/SATA card consume a big chunk of PCI bandwidth, so if one has a lot of PCI cards (digidesign, UAD etc.) that the use of a PCI/SATA card could very possibly bottleneck the system's performance at the PCI level?

Thanks.

Sure-- everything takes some CPU but:

1. Using a separate drive for very busy libraries will improve aggregate seek times. A large grand piano streaming from the same drive as BFD or some other CPU/bus intensive library will clog a single drive. Probably not as big an issue for smaller libraries-- but all it take is for one pop or one click to start a thread!

2. The amount of CPU used on one computer or two is probably comparable. The question is whether or not you've exceed the capacity of a single computer and needed to run G-Studio on a separate comptuer (ie: a PC). Everything has limits, but resources are meant to be used-- used carefully, but they're meant to be used, notwithstanding. It helps to know your computer's breaking point and leave it some headroom.

3. If we're talking about MacPros, there are three independent busses for each PCI slot. For most G5s, there is one 133Mhz independent PCI slot with two 100Mhz slots that share a single bus. That far exceeds the "safe" method of using a bunch of firewire drives on a single bus running at 33Mhz, which is the max even on the fastest Mac right now. So 133Mhz goes a long way with a PCI slot running HDs. It's really a cool configuration... even where FW-PCI hosts are used.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:26 pm

p.pan wrote:I would like to take Two Raptor 150 G 10k
For sampling and the VIs.

which SATA PCIx card work nice????

I see the sonnet look nice some body have feedback???

Thanks for your reply.

The Sonnet would be my #1 recommendation. I have a PCIx vesion running in a G5. It's brilliant!

p.pan · Post by **p.pan** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 1:23 am

Thanks Frodo,

I use one port PCIx for the Uad 1, (the slot 4) 64bit,133Mhz.
I can use the slot 3 64 bit 100Mhz???

For the sonnet i try to find one PCIx Card with just 2 Sata.

Thanks

bdr · Post by **bdr** » Fri Jan 11, 2008 6:33 pm

First off, I'd like to say thanks to everyone that contributes to this forum. I've learnt so much about potential systems etc.

OK so I've done a lot of reading about drives, streaming etc as I'm about to get one of the new MacPros. My head is spinning like a 10,000 RPM external eSATA Raptor JBOD concatenated set of disks (or was that RAID 6?). Anyhow I'm going with basically the same setup as Gabe S's on page 1 of this thread..internal drive(320), 500GB 7200 for projects, and 2 x 150 Raptors for my orchestral library.I have EWQLSO Gold, and just bought Platinum as well. I'd like to ask Frodo, as you seem to have similar libraries to me, how you have them setup over your drives.
I'm also still tossing up whether to RAID-0 the Raptors, or JBOD them. I understand the pitfalls of both, but how different are the performance positives?

Thx

Brett