So what's wrong with using a USB external drive...

[HCMarkus]

Of the reasonably affordable solutions in descending order of speed:

1. eSATA and eSATA II (eSATA II is faster than eSATA)

2: firewire

3. usb

Why a MacPro (with its multiple internal SATA ports and drive caddies) is THE Mac to use for DAWs. As Cosmo Casterini said in Moonstruck: "It costs money because it SAVES money!"

[Frodo]

"It costs money because it SAVES money!"

Or, as PC users say of Mac users---

With Mac, it only hurts at cash register.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

1. Oh, this device is less expensive and the same size. What's the difference? I'll buy the cheap one.

2. Oh, my VIs are sputtering all over the place. It must be DP. It must be OSX. It must be my computer. I'll buy a new computer.

But that device is less expensive, and the VIs are sputtering so it must be DP, OS X and the new computer.

What's a fella to do?

[Frodo]

You know, it's easy to forget what a learning process all of this is and how painful that learning process can be. I know his info is posted all over the forum, but maybe it's worth citing a list of basics for DAW work in one place apart from some of the tips threads as long as we're talking about data management in general.

Softsynths tend not to be a problem since that data is small and is loaded into RAM. Streaming audio and VIs using samples of any kind are the items to watch and to carefully manage.

Hard drives

While it is possible to stream audio from the system drive, it is not advised to do so for heavy projects. The system drive is busy with updated virtual memory data, so streaming audio from the system drive makes it work harder than it probably should.

Types of drives and their connections have been discussed. SATA/eSATA rock. Firewire- gooooooood. USB-- archive only, but not great for streaming.

Put streaming VI libraries on different hard drives and leave the System Drive to do its thing. Place busy sample-based VIs on their own dedicated drives where possible, such as large piano libraries or orchestra libraries. The larger orchestra libraries could even be split up to stream from several different drives because of the amount of data that must be streamed at once. Organize your VIs across several hard drives so that their work load is distributed as evenly as possible. Too much streaming from a single drive at once can impact seek and transfer rates.

Put recorded audio (ie: DP projects) on its own dedicated drive. We know how quickly the soundbite list can grow, so for the sake of seek and transfer efficiency having a dedicated audio/project drive can help.

For those hard drives to which data (audio) is constantly recorded, erased, etc., consider defragging once in a while. All those soundbites can get sundered over time and slow down the performance. As those drives approach being 80% full, consider offloading the data to another hard drive. A full hard drive is not a happy hard drive.

The point at which one considers an extra drive (or more) is the moment when one's projects don't run as smoothly. There are other considerations to weigh as well:

RAM

Project stuttering or pops/clicks, etc., can also be the result of overworking the RAM. 2GB may be *enough* RAM for a lot of projects, but these days 4GB would be a better place to start for serious DAW work. If your VIs can access RAM outside of DP's own 4GB limit, it's worth considering adding even more RAM (if your machine can handle it) because it takes quite a load off of DP and OSX (virtual memory is always in action).

Busses and Data Streams

Run your hard drives along different data busses to avoid data clog. This is slightly different from putting libraries on different drives. One could daisy chain several firewire drives along one single firewire buss, but at some point there will be data clog.

As mentioned earlier, firewire has gotten a lot better-- 2.5Ghz (or probably closer to 2.66Ghz). But for those with the old 33Mhz firewire busses, consider another data path. When traffic on one street gets busy, it's nice to send some of that traffic along a parallel road to keep things moving along nicely, if you take my meaning.

... MacBook Pro users have the option of the card slot to add a separate firewire buss or even eSATA which can be used in addition to the MBPs firewire port. (Unless I'm mistaken, MacBook users do not have this option of late. Also, in some cases, MacBooks' CPUs share RAM with the graphics display, so these are not really ideal for heavy DAW work.

... iMac users have fewer options for expansion. The newer machines have the faster firewire buss, which is probably one of the best improvements Apple could have made next to upping the RAM limit to 8GB. One can hit an iMac pretty hard, no doubt, but one should also be aware that there are limits. If a firewire interface is in use, keep an eye out (figuratively speaking) for the number of external hard drives in use concurrently. Again, the newer machines will have an easier time with all of this

... MacPros... like HCMarkus said, these machines were built for the heaviest lifting and greatest expandability. SATA and eSATA advantages cannot be overstated, although once again, the latest models offer important improvements with firewire performance. PCIe slots are the bee's knees for a whole lot of reasons, including the ability to employ host cards for FW and eSATA.

Buffers all over the place

Most streaming VIs will have their own "engines" whose buffers can be set independently from DP's audio buffers. Always inspect your VI's preferences to see if their buffers or "engine levels" can be raised. This *could* allow one to keep DP's buffers low for the sake keeping latency down, but care must be taken that more data is not being streamed into DP than its buffers can handle. This takes a little trial and error, but not much.

Wonky AUs

Test your VIs for compatibility, and gather as much info on those VIs as you can before you install them. Should find the need to remove a plugin, make sure you check the Library> Audio>Plugins folders in *both* the root directory (Macintosh HD) as well as your User directory.

One other thing--

If you are using a VI such as PLAY, VSL, or a recent version of Kontakt, you probably want to keep DP's Work Priority at MEDIUM. The reason for this is that these three VIs (maybe others) use independent servers which have their own ways of accessing RAM outside of DP. A Work Priority setting of MEDIUM will help prevent different types of independently running software from competing for CPU cycles and memory.

If all of your VIs are running inside DP and-- if you are still experiencing trouble above and beyond all other solutions mentioned above-- try setting DP's Work Priority to HIGH.

Those are the basics. There are other ways to optimize one's computer for DAW work, like disabling internet connections while working and disabling any automated tasks-- like spinning down hard drives or setting the machine to sleep.

"But I do this all the time and have never had a problem."

Could be true. That doesn't mean that this couldn't be an eventual source of a problem. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Otherwise, consider it a way to troubleshoot in case of emergency. Until then, keep on sailing.

Disabling the internet connection (or manually turning it off while you work) can help in a lot of ways. Things like Widgets constantly poll for updates, like weather, dictionary updates, and other info. Software Update, when set to check automatically, will do the same.

If you want to know how often your machine polls the internet when connected, enable Folder Actions. A warning window will pop up each time a plist is updated or some other activity has taken place. I tried this at the advice of David Bourke (thank you, David). It can get obnoxious, though-- when you're working in DP the message window pops up every few minutes and interrupts DP. It's not good to work this way, but it was great to know a little more about what was going on under the hood.

For those who'd like to try this, I'll put David's instructions below.

Well-- I hope this helps in some way. Be wise and be aware!

AND BACK UP YOUR DATA!!

RE: Folder Actions

Double click on "Configure Folder Actions." Click the + button under the left column and navigate to your User Preferences folder to add it. You should see a sheet come up automatically with "Add ••“ New Item Alert." This is the one you want. Accept it and it should be added to the right column. Now check all the checkboxes to arm the process.

Now, one by one, launch and quit all your apps and utilities. Whenever one of them writes a .plist file to your User Preferences folder, you'll get an alert from Folder Actions with a button which allows you to identify the file that's just been added. This way, you should easily be able to identify the perp(s).

[HCMarkus]

AND BACK UP YOUR DATA!!

Word.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

With Time Machine there is NO REASON to not have data backed up.

[Frodo]

With Time Machine there is NO REASON to not have data backed up.

Very true-- makes it convenient not to have to use a third-party utility... unless one is still using Tiger.

[HCMarkus]

With Time Machine there is NO REASON to not have data backed up.

Very true-- makes it convenient not to have to use a third-party utility... unless one is still using Tiger.

Meow. I let Time Machine do my Tiger backups when I boot into Leo to emails and other non-music stuff. I was gonna' do a RAID Mirror for my music recording, but ran into a few issues. I'm holding off on implementing the RAID setup until I finish my current project, due at Month's End. This is no time to be futzing around!

[Frodo]

This is no time to be futzing around!

I now live in a different shire than where I was born and grew up, but the old folks back there used to use the term "putzy futzing".

We'll have none of that, either!!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

This is no time to be futzing around!

I now live in a different shire than where I was born and grew up, but the old folks back there used to use the term "putzy futzing".

We'll have none of that, either!!

Not even one thin 'putzy fuzy' thin mint?

[Frodo]

"It's wafer thin!"

[midiw]

I've got a headache.

Just asking again:

I found a USB with a rpm of 7200 which is the same speed as both of my internal hard drives.

So would the external USB with a rpm not keep up with the internal hard drive when I am only recording one stereo track ?

( side bar question: any good books/DVD to help me with DP6 ? or any youTube ? )

[MIDI Life Crisis]

As mentioned before, it will probably record a stereo track fine. The rotation speed and the access speed (two very different numbers) don't tell the whole story. It is how the data is sent to and from the drive as well as what else needs to be sent (calls to the OS, apps, etc.)

Look at it like this. A Volkswagen and a Porsche will both get you from point A to point B. They will both get you on to the freeway and reach legal (and illegal) speeds. But when a semi come barreling up your ass at 90 MPH, you want to be in the Porsche and gun it. You can gun the VW as well. One is going to do what you want. The other...

Just get the damn firewire drive... BTW, that looks a little like a Porsche in the picture. Firewire can crash too...

[cuttime]

I think the troughput depends on the cache memory size of the USB drive. YMMV. They are cheap, give it a try. Now I know that it goes against conventional wisdom, but I have used 7200 RPM USB drives with 16MB cache sizes that have rivaled the performance of Firewire drives on my system (32+tracks). Sorry, I can't give you a refund...

[midiw]

I've got a major Tylenol headache today.

I took one of my FW drives, formatted it according to the rule of Apple's disk utility for purposes of installing the Leopard using wifey;s MacIntel.

All went well with "scan" and installation BUT when I rebooted to the LEOPARD on the FW drive it was sooo slow.

I did the TechToolPro version 5.0.6 and DiskWarrior 4.0.2 and all was OK.

Still the LEOPARD was just a TURTLE.

Today I wanted to install LOGIC 9 and so far 10 hours later it is sill installing ( 10 GB ).

The FW is about year old but rarely used.

Tomorrow AM will be going to my local Apple service centre to get the genius to tell me what's wrong.

So much for a $200. FW drive. Dmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Oh I should go see how the installation is going.