Firewire 800, ATA100, or ?? to replace SCSI drives for Audio

[DBorgers]

My question is based around the system I have at home for recording/overdubbing my projects:

G4 FW800 1.42ghz dual
2 gig ram
Maxtor ATA133 130 gig (on the internal ATA100 bus)
IBM ATA100 60 gig (on the internal ATA100 bus)
2 Cheetah UltraSCSI drives and Adaptec PowerDomain 29160N PCI card
OXX 10.3.9
Cubase SX3
PCI-324 and 2408 MK2
UAD-1 Studio Pak x 1 (buying a 2nd UAD card this week)

Currently, I have 2 UltraSCSI drives via Adaptec PowerDomain 29160N - one for samples and one for audio in current projects. Cubase is on the System Disk.

Adaptec is no longer offering drivers beyond Mac OX 10.3.9 and I'm moving to Tiger 10.4.6 and so I need to get new hard drives or a new SCSI card for my audio drives. With SCSI on it's way out I think I need to change the hard drives for my audio - especially since the ATA100's and SATA's are so dollar friendly per gigabyte.

I use VSTi's quite a bit, The Grand, Battery, Reason, Groove Agent, Core Drummer, etc.

HERE'S MY QUESTION = Will Firewire 800 be suffiicient for audio drives? Are ATA100 7200rpm drives enough? I only record 2-8 tracks at a time max, but use all 24 channels of bus out via PCI-324 to my O2R via ADAT optical with 24-48 tracks of audio running at the same time - sometimes I print VSTi's.

What would be your recommendations for new hard drives for recording audio? Firewire 800?, Firewire 800 RAID (2 drives)?, SATA?, or are ATA100 drives fast enough at 7200rpms for that many tracks?

A know SATA (with a PCI card) is an option, but if I can free up another PCI slot by not having to go the PCI SATA card route to free up PCI bandwidth for my PCI-324 and UAD cards I'd rather do that.

Any experience anyone can share about performance of FW800 and ATA100 drives in DAW use would be very helpful and appreciated. I'll get SATA card If I have to , but if Firewire800, Firewire800 2 disk RAID setup, old plain old ATA100 would be enough I'd rather do that.

Thanks

Danny Borgers
_________________
G4 FW800 1.42ghz 2 mg ram
120 and 60 gb ATA100 Internal Drives,
2 UltraSCSI Drives via Adaptec 29160N
OSX 10.3.9
PCI-324 2408 Mk2,
Yahama O2R
Cubase SX3
VSTi's:
The Grand, Battery, Groove Agent, Virtual Guitarist, and many more
Reason 3.0
CoreDrums
Korg and Roland sound modules and other stuff

[swiftness]

Firewire is definitely fast enough, but I question its reliability. I have personally had two firewire drives crash on me in the last three years. If you do get firewire drives, make sure to get a big case with a fan! The sleek little cases with no fans fry hard drives.

If you are willing to spend a little bit more, I would consider eSATA as it really seems like a much more stable (and blazing fast) solution.