HD for audio: SATA, Firewire800 or USB2?

fsheinfeld · Post by **fsheinfeld** » Thu Jun 05, 2008 4:13 pm

What do you guys recommend for a secondary drive?

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Thu Jun 05, 2008 5:23 pm

fsheinfeld wrote:What do you guys recommend for a secondary drive?

You are always going to be better off with an internal drive (IMO). I'd do an SATA 500GB. They're running between $80-100 at the moment. Really!

I put a Western Digital in about 2 months ago and it's been great. 1T of internal HD space is awesome. I kind of stay away from USB and prefer FW 800 as it is (or seems) faster than UCB2. The film guys I work with seem to prefer that as well.

fsheinfeld · Post by **fsheinfeld** » Thu Jun 05, 2008 5:48 pm

Thanks!

kgdrum · Post by **kgdrum** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 5:17 am

+1 agree w/MLC sata all the way

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 5:49 am

WD SATA all the way here too.

kgdrum · Post by **kgdrum** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 7:35 am

everyone will have different opinions on brands but I prefer Seagate drives

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 7:46 am

kgdrum wrote:everyone will have different opinions on brands but I prefer Seagate drives

After many years of successful HD usage (and seeing many friends have their HDs bite the big one over and over and over) I am convinced that brand isn't as important as maintenance and care.

Load up the drive with a lot of crap, never run utilities and never maintain your system health and you are going to have a problem. I am also extremely suspicious of games. Many take over the OS completely and that has concerned me from my Atari days. There have never been any games on my systems. Even the Mac games that come with the system (bugdom, dino-whatever) get deleted. I will keep the chess game but have yet to find time to use it.

Computing since 1986 and have yet to loose all but one HD on my Atari laptop many years ago. Of course, the day is still young...

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 8:00 am

I've found that game ROMs that run in shells such as MAME are OK, Mike.

Stand-alone releases and ones that are discreet apps worry me for the reason you mentioned.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 8:02 am

monkey man wrote:I've found that ROMs that run in shells such as MAME are OK...

I have no idea what that means...

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 8:18 am

MAME = Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAME

I used to run MacMAME, but now, as it was discontinued not long before Mac went Intel, I run MAME OS X.
This is the "shell" app, the hardware emulation layer, if you will.
The app is free, as are the ROMs, but it's always been illegal to offer the app along with ROMs on the same site, so one hunts for ROMs after having acquired the shell.

There are shells for Sega, Atari, Sony, Nintendo, Commodore and may other home video games systems too.

Some ROM sites:

http://www.coolrom.com/affiliate.php
http://www.angelroms.com/
http://www.bestdownload.com/
http://www.buttonbash.com/
http://www.computeremuzone.com/
http://www.dchaven.com/
http://www.romshare.net/
http://www.emulazone.com/
http://www.emulanium.com/
http://www.emuparadise.org/
http://www.freeroms.com/
http://www.gamesroms.com/
http://www.nesfiles.com/
http://www.romhustler.net/
http://www.romnation.net/
http://www.theroms.com/
http://www.rom-world.com/

I've a bunch of arcade games running under a single shell, FWIW.
Took a millenium to download, but I was motivated as I missed out completely when I was a kid as I had no money.
I used to go to the arcades and watch folks playing all day.

jliechty · Post by **jliechty** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 4:33 pm

kgdrum wrote:everyone will have different opinions on brands but I prefer Seagate drives

I have several Western Digitals and several Seagates, and all have served well so far (*knocks on wood*). Obviously, internal connection with SATA is always the best, but Firewire 800 is an acceptable substitute. I frequently work from an external bus-powered 120GB 5400RPM 2.5" Firewire 800 drive, and despite all the things that you'd imagine would conspire against it, it handles reasonably sized DP projects without any problems (it's done 20 tracks at a time with plenty of bandwidth to spare).

azusa749a · Post by **azusa749a** » Sat Jun 07, 2008 12:03 am

Western Digital announced almost 2 months ago that they are shipping the next-generation 10,000 RPM, 2.5-inch (in 3.5 inch form),
300 GB SATA Hard Drive, WD VelociRaptor.
It is 35 percent faster and twice the capacity of the previous performance king (Raptor).

I've been on the lookout since, but haven't seen one yet.

They are also working on 20,000 rpm hard dive.

jliechty · Post by **jliechty** » Sat Jun 07, 2008 4:50 am

The Velociraptor is an excellent drive, just be aware that it won't fit in the standard Mac Pro drive bays. It's a 2.5" drive mounted in a heatsink and 3.5" adapter, so the SATA and power connections are not in the standard location. Thus, it can not mate with the connections on the motherboard of the Mac Pro. However, I'm sure there's some way to make it work (by adapting it to the second CD/DVD bay, perhaps).

mhschmieder · Post by **mhschmieder** » Tue Jun 10, 2008 1:21 pm

One caveat with the faster spin cycles is that disc noise starts to get into the audible range and could affect your recording environment (or require isolation that was unnecessary before).

This is simply what I've been told by several people who've upgraded to 10k drives. I'm not speaking from personal experience. Others might chime in to either refute or reinforce this claim.

MOTUnation.com

HD for audio: SATA, Firewire800 or USB2?

HD for audio: SATA, Firewire800 or USB2?

Re: HD for audio: SATA, Firewire800 or USB2?