Hard Drive Performance - What to get

[pcm]

Based on an article I read in Sound on Sound, July 2003 I chose a Hitachi/IBM Deskstar 120gb drive and put it on the internal ATA100 bus. They did a bunch of tests, in Logic, re track count. All drives were 7200 RPM, all with 8mb cache. The numbers were like this for a single drive using large files (that is, not little short snippets of audio) :

Western Digital max track count 39
hitachi/IBM deskstar max track count 60
Seagate max track count 38

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I used Western Digital 8meg cashe drives for years, and had no trouble doing 90+ tracks on one drive.

[pcm]

Wow!!! great feedback.
Going to do a little research tomorrow taking into consideration your input. I was going to go 300GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ATA/6 7200RPM 16MB Buffer, 5yr Seagate Warranty (SEAST3300622A) for data and 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ATA/6 7200RPM 8MB Buffer w/5yr Seagate Warranty (SEAST3250824A) for backup and transfer between locations,
Now that I hear this news from you (although I've enver seen a seagate die (exept for right out of the box) and I've installed and fixed alot of them software-wise, I'm going to re-think my strategy. Maxtor seems to have alot more death stories than a dependable product should. I wonder if that's why they're so cheap.

I see why you went with the CPU upgrade. Still, if for some reason you had to use AHT it would not report properly. I'm sure tech tool tells you all you need to know. It just doesn't output the same error codes if any.

Seagate is probably the best and most reliable. That's why they can offer a five year warranty, when everyone else is at three years. When I set up two new G5's, I went Seagate on both for audio. They do in fact work great.

CPU upgrades are a quick fix, and at some point, some new hardware, software, or OS upgrade will break them. Been there, done that. Buy a cheap solution, get a cheap solution.

[pcm]

It's definitely food for thought. That's for sure. As I was adding to my post, you sent me your reply. I was actually going to get the 1st drive I listed but after hearing your post, I have to weigh my costs. so you've helped me a lot as well as hindered my progress. Of course doing the best thing is the most important issue here. Extremely interesting ideas to move the DVD drive to the other bus. I've never heard anybody do this on a Mac and I've been working on them for about 6 years now.
Can anybody tell me if they've done any bus swapping like this on a Mac? I'm extremely interested.

After some more thought and research I decided to go with 2 - Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 HDT722525DLAT80 drives.

I really appreciate everyone's assistance and will check back over the next couple of days to see if this thread has anything new and interesting in it. I'm still very interested in the bus swapping and if i can get a hold of some cables for free, I'll probably give that a shot after i aquire some data on the box.

The bus that the DVD drive is on is quite a bit slower, a bad place to put an audio drive. Plus, there is not very good ventilation there, so there is that also. But even with a longer cable, you will have bad audio performance off that bus.

I've watched too many Deskstars die to ever buy one again. There have even been class action lawsuits on certain models. I know, 'cause I was part of one. They're cheap, oem drives. They show up in basic PC boxes. For audio, I'd go with something more robust, like Seagate.

[baanes]

The bus that the DVD drive is on is quite a bit slower, a bad place to put an audio drive. Plus, there is not very good ventilation there, so there is that also. But even with a longer cable, you will have bad audio performance off that bus.

Can you back that up? I belive that on a G4 tower both busses are identical ata/66 busses. G5s use serial ata for the hard disks which is faster (but not quite a bit faster). I can't speak to the ventilation issues though; you may have a point there.

[bh]

Extremely interesting information. This post seems to have taken on a new life.
The reason I did not go Seagate was because they did not give all the specs I wanted to see (I'm not sure which they were, I forgot but) it may have been the sustained data transfer rates, which I learned from one of the repies is very important. In the past couple of years, Hitachi has gotten way more reliable. For a while, a couple of years back, I would not touch one and Seagate was the most reliable way to go.

[bh]

I removed a lot of items that don't need to be there for recording.

Like what? I know I have a ton of stuff in mine that I don't need but are there specific files etc..t hat I can get rid of also, i knew my way around OS 9 pretty well but I don't know OSX too well in terms of configuring things.

Any advice?
Thanks,
Eddie

As far as what files you can remove from OS X, this is a do it at your own risk, I will not support you if you have any problems resulting from what I tell you.
Go to the Library:Printers folder and remove any folder with a printer company name on it. Go to the ppd, and remove eveything in it. Basically that printers folder should be empty except for anything you absolutely need. Walk though those folders and delete any language you don't use.
Search .lproj and delete any language you don't use. You could open all the application packages and do the same. Without a real knowledge of the system, I would not recommend going any deeper than this (but you could).
The first boot up may be a bit slower but after that you see a faster startup, epecially on a slower box. Don't forget to make sure your system is in excellent shape before you do anything at all. Good Luck

[pcm]

The bus that the DVD drive is on is quite a bit slower, a bad place to put an audio drive. Plus, there is not very good ventilation there, so there is that also. But even with a longer cable, you will have bad audio performance off that bus.

Can you back that up? I belive that on a G4 tower both busses are identical ata/66 busses. G5s use serial ata for the hard disks which is faster (but not quite a bit faster). I can't speak to the ventilation issues though; you may have a point there.

The DVD bus is ATA33. At least as of the last time I looked. Perhaps they sped it up on later models, but I don't see why they would bother, as ATA33 is far faster than any optical drive.

The Mirror Drive Door G4s has a second ATA bus in them, and that would be an ace place to stick one or two more audio drives. I forget if the original poster had one of those machines or not...

The serial ATA bus in the G5s is at 150, so five times faster than the ATA 33 bus.

On the subject of heat, there is no fan in that area of the machine, and drives will run hotter there. Hotter means shorter life.

There's a possibility that I might have some of the wrong, but I believe it's correct.

[cxi2001]

Re : CPU upgrades on a G4
We got a Sonnet 1.2 GHZ CPU upgrade for a G4 AGP which works just fine BUT is really quite noisy, fortunately we don't use it for audio work but this maybe be an issue if you were.....