Ultralite and a external Firewire HDD

mrausch · Post by **mrausch** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 1:21 pm

Hi,

my ultralite just arrived, very cool device. I use it with a G4 15,2 Powerbook. I plan to use it with Ablteon Live 5 for Live DJ Gigs (Ultralite replaces my Echo Indigo DJ PCMCIA Card). I have stored all my music on a external firewire 400 / 800 Disk. No i am not sure where to connect the disk. To the Firewire 800 Bus on my powerbook or through the ultralight that‘s connected to the 400 Port.
Do you have any suggestions?
Thnx for your help...
Michael

baanes · Post by **baanes** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 2:34 pm

I remember hearing that using an hdd on the 800 along with an interface on the 400 has caused problems for some people. As for chaining, usually its best to chain through the interface (connect drive to interface; interface to computer), however you could probably connect the interface to the drive if the drive is plugged into the firewire 800 bus.

kelldammit · Post by **kelldammit** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 4:16 pm

it's generally not recommended to put two high-throughput devices on one fw bus...the 400/800 ports on the pb are actually just separate ports on the same fw controller/bus. however, i'd imagine that if you're only using a couple audio channels at a time, and a couple of tracks from the hd max, you could probably get away with it without issue.
for serious audio recording, though, a separate fw card to run either the interface or the hd would be the way to go.

mrausch · Post by **mrausch** » Tue Apr 25, 2006 12:51 am

thnx for your suggestions...what do you think about using the usb 2.0 port for hdd use on the powerbook in combination with a firewire audio device? Is the 2.0 port reliable? Or is it even more risky than chain the hdd through the ultralight?

chorga1 · Post by **chorga1** » Thu Apr 27, 2006 3:03 pm

I run my hdd on a USB 2.0 port and it works fine. I can stream 18-24 channels depending on the sample and bit rates...

I am using a PC

Chris

4MuLA · Post by **4MuLA** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 12:18 pm

I had troubles running the Ultralite with an external HD LaCie Porsche Firewire 400. The computer I'm using is a MacBook Intel Core Duo.
The HD is chained to the interface, and the interface is plugged in the only Firewire port of the MacBook. I started having lots of cracks, clicks etc while running challenging projects with a lot of audio tracks, it looked like the hard drive was running to slow when reading from it.

So i tried a portable hard drive, same routing, and this time everything works perfectly. Funny thing is that the hard drive that works, has even a slower spindle speed (5400 RMP) against the 7200 RPM of the LaCie Porsche.
I tried the same routing also with another firewire drive, and still cracks and clicks. I almost returned the Ultralite but it looks like the problem is in the transfer rate of certain hard drives, not the interface.