Can I share FW sample drive & Liquid Mix?

[James Steele]

With some the deals going on with virtual instruments my poor system drive is getting crowded. There's a 1.5 terabyte external FW drive on sale at Fry's. I'm considering getting it and moving VI sample data to this drive. Will I be asking for trouble using this and Liquid Mix at the same time?

More specifically my plan is to connect LM to the FW connector on the front of my G5 and the external 1.5 TB drive to the connector on the back. Also thinking I'll make a 500GB partition for my VI samples and the remaing 1TB for Time Machine backup of my internal audio drive and my system drive.

Should this work? Thoughts?

[newrigel]

If you have the room James, get a sonnet pcie FW card and dedicate it to the liquid mix. You'll be happy you did because the FW bus will be more efficient if you spead out the duties to each. I had a LM and I had to get a pcie card to keep the artiacts down in the audio... and I was using internal HD's.

[James Steele]

I've had no issues with the Liquid Mix but I don't push it very hard. I'm on a G5 with PCI-X slots and they're all being used. I was hoping to come up with an interim solution until I can get a newer Intel Mac. I could maybe lose the PoCo card to make room for eSATA but the card would be no good once I get an Intel.

Of course I imagine as PCI-X is disappearing I might find an eSATA card cheap and can always use enclosures with new system.

[burn em]

Pull out your' optical drive and put a fast ATA/IDE hard drive in its place on the optical drive's ATA cable. Then put your' optical drive in an external ATA - USB chassis. Burn speeds will be slower, but hey, its a pretty elegant solution!

Then when you get an intel you can put the ATA/IDE drive in the USB chassis and use it for archiving/backups.

[newrigel]

Pull out your' optical drive and put a fast ATA/IDE hard drive in its place on the optical drive's ATA cable. Then put your' optical drive in an external ATA - USB chassis. Burn speeds will be slower, but hey, its a pretty elegant solution!

Then when you get an intel you can put the ATA/IDE drive in the USB chassis and use it for archiving/backups.

Good luck with the speed of that drive on that bus. I wouldn't spend the $ on an IDE drive because your going to have to get a case specially for it and SATA would be the way to go since you'll be able to use them in your Mac Pro too. The optical replacement works cool for the SATA buss (like in the newer 2009 models) but the Ultra ATA/100 bus which are what it uses aren't worth the $ to mess with because they're too slow for audio. But it can be done, just don't expect much out of it.

[burn em]

Pull out your' optical drive and put a fast ATA/IDE hard drive in its place on the optical drive's ATA cable. Then put your' optical drive in an external ATA - USB chassis. Burn speeds will be slower, but hey, its a pretty elegant solution!

Then when you get an intel you can put the ATA/IDE drive in the USB chassis and use it for archiving/backups.

Good luck with the speed of that drive on that bus. I wouldn't spend the $ on an IDE drive because your going to have to get a case specially for it and SATA would be the way to go since you'll be able to use them in your Mac Pro too. The optical replacement works cool for the SATA buss (like in the newer 2009 models) but the Ultra ATA/100 bus which are what it uses aren't worth the $ to mess with because they're too slow for audio. But it can be done, just don't expect much out of it.

I still use ide drives for 32 and 40 track muiltitracking, while they are definitely not as fast as ANY sata drive, while using firewire 400 (which is what james was originally asking about) I don't think you would see much if any speed benefit from sata in a fw 400 chassis. the fw 400 bandwidth just bottoms out. Since my solution puts the ide/ata drive directly on an ide/ata bus its going to be marginally quicker than being in a firewire chassis. On top of that Ide/ata drives are dirt cheep now.

[James Steele]

Well, I may have decided what to do. I just came across a PCI-X Firewire card that I bought inexpensively not long ago. I think I'll have to give up my PoCo Element card and ClassicVerb and substitute Plate 140, etc. and then put that Firewire card in there. I should be able to then have an external FW sample drive and the LM on a different bus? I think I can give up the PoCo stuff. Classic Verb is the only thing I was keeping it around for. But I agree with Shooshie that it is a nice reverb.

[James Steele]

Great... I wish my mind would stop working this way? If I'm going to give up a slot, might I be better of with an eSATA card and going that route? Isn't eSATA faster? Or perhaps I could get an enclosure that's FW+eSATA if such a thing exists and when I finally get an Intel, put eSATA card in the Intel??? Hmmmm...