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I'm sure this was covered somewhere in these forums, but the search topic was too broad.

Anyway, I've been doing location recording for a little bit now while using a 200GB LaCie Firewire drive. My question is geared toward people's opinion and experience:

Is my LaCie reliable enough to track to (as I've been doing), or should I just use the 60GB internal drive on my G4 PowerBook?

My thinking is that if I don't need to bring my LaCie with me every time, it'll be one less thing to have to hook up and worry about.

I worked in a studio that used several LaCies. At the time, (2 years ago, I guess) their drivers were completely incompatible with DP stuff, or whatever else it was, don't remember. But having both drivers going was causeing the drives to not show up. Had to resurrect the drives with Disk Warrior a bunch of times - it was a stressful headache. Since then, I think those problems have been rectified.

I have used EZQuest firewire drives with good success, until the chipsets crapped out. This seems to be fairly universal, an a result of an Apple software issue, though I'm not sure how that happens. But the chipsets were used in many different manufacturer's things.

So the real thing is bandwidth. What else is on your firewire bus, and at what speed? An internal SATA is going to smoke everything else, no matter if the disk speed in terms of r's p.m. are the same. If you're not loading up your firewire bus other ways, you should be fine with the LaCie. But nothing will be as immediate, or stable, in my opinion, as the internal drive.

I have since installed a huge internal drive on my ATA bus, and use the firewire drives strictly as backups. That way I can take those drives to another location and not be screwed due to theft, fire, etc.

Jeff wrote:An internal SATA is going to smoke everything else

I totally agree! I have a lacie FW drive and it never let me down though. 4 wonderful years of abuse and we're still friends!

(BTW, I ordered an internal 7200rpm Hitachi drive for my powerbook...)

Hi All,

just a quick note on the side: you mention the 7200 rpm drive.. I work mainly on a powerbook 1 Gig(last titanium).
I read a post somewhere that the good ol' powerbook G4 can do 32 tracks out of the box. It surprised me because I had to order a 7200 rmp drive to be able to record more than 7 tracks simultaneously.

Before I decided to go and buy the faster drive I tested with 20-channels of recording silence nevertheless putting the old slow drive to handle 20-channels of nothing without a glitch. I tracked down were the temp-files were stored and when they were put in the Audio-Files folder. All the bytes were actually there. But in a real-world situation I could not get more than 7 channels. I always suspected the combined firewire / ada chips on the motherboard not to be able to handle both a lot of disk activity and firewire activity at the same time. The new drive however did solve the problem. (7200 rpm and 8MB buffer)

Any ideas/experiences on internal drives vs. use of firewire bus + external FW-drives ?

Hope you can follow this weird asci-sequence . .

I have used probably 40 or more LaCie external FW drives over the last 3 years on a variety of projects using DP and ProTools for audio, and FCP for film/video projects.

Thay are really so inexpensive I always encourage the client to buy one drive for work and one for constant backup. ( I usually also keep a second backup on one of my own drives too) . I only ever had one drive fail, and due to constant backing up only lost a couple of hours work ( on a 3 month project )

That would be my recommendation

Although stick with the 300 Gb max, not the big drives


Stephen

"But in a real-world situation I could not get more than 7 channels. I always suspected the combined firewire / ada chips on the motherboard not to be able to handle both a lot of disk activity and firewire activity at the same time. The new drive however did solve the problem. (7200 rpm and 8MB buffer)"

The de-facto standard for audio is 7200 rpm. You run into problems like yours with anything less than that. In power towers, you get error messages like - funny this - "disk too slow?" or too many tracks, etc. However, a fast disc won't matter if your bus is slower than ••••. Although I have actually tracked to a drive, and retrieved, with fairly monstrous plug-in loads, 30 tracks of audio on an internal 7200/8 on my ATAPI bus, which is like a quarter (not sure if I have the ratio exactly right, but get the picture) of my ATA 66 bus bandwidth.

In this situation, a chipset failure forced me to pull my drive from a firewire housing and stick in any available hole, and that was it. Over the dvd rom drive in my G4. It worked, but lagged once I got more stuff going on. STuck it on the ATA bus and I was fine.

Hope this is illustrative. By the way, for the originator of the post, that was an EZQuest that I had the problem with. I love the housings because they're cool and quiet, but if these other people used boatloads of LaCies without fail, and two of my EZQuests had chipset problems, well....

If your laptop can be separated from your control room when mixing, then the noise won't be an issue-I'm thinking at this point I'd go with a LaCie rather than what I've used.

What about external drives using USB2.0? is USB2 reliable enough to get 8-16 tracks of audio aout of an external 7200rpm hard drive?

JP

Wow, thanks for the replies! I think I'll stick with my LaCie for now.