Question about Firewire and External Hard Drives

[paulguitar]

I have an iMac G5 PPC 1.8 GHz and am looking at purchasing a new 27 " iMac, probably the quad core. (I'm really not sure what the difference in use would be between the dual and quad cores.) My question pertains to the ports. Right now I have two Firewire 400 ports in which I have my Traveler and my OWC Neptune 300 GB drive connected. The new iMacs have one Firewire 800 port. I want to get a new drive that will use the Firewire 800 connection. Should I hook that up to my computer and then get a Firewire 800 to 400 cable and connect my Traveler to the back of the drive? Also, what difference does a 16 mb and 32 mb cache in the drive do to working with the audio and MIDI? I use Kontakt 3 and plan to upgrade to 4.

I'm using DP 6.02. I have a small home studio and am planning to do much more recording for audio and MIDI so I want to be sure what i will be buying, etc.

Thanks for any help.
Paul

[Jim]

Most experts would probably suggest you connect the Traveler to your computer, and daisy-chain your drive off the Traveler. If you plan for the Traveler to use bus-power, you may have no other choice.

Anytime you connect a FW 400 device with a FW800 device, the whole shebang then runs at the slower speed... in your case 400 Mbits. That should be good enough for your audio needs, though.

Faster and more cores will allow you to run more plug-ins.

I dunno about the cache, but I don't think there's a real benefit to 32 over 16 for audio work, because the size of the cache rarely comes up in problem/solution scenarios.

[paulguitar]

Thank you Jim.
Paul

[HCMarkus]

All you need is a 400 to 800 Firewire adaptor and you should be in business. If you ever run into bandwidth issues, I suppose you could connect your HD via USB, but Firewire is a superior technology for streaming data. As noted previously in this forum, if Apple put an eSATA port on the iMac, it would probably sell a lot fewer Mac Pros!