High track count recording vs. Hard Drive

Macinbowl · Post by **Macinbowl** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 7:54 pm

What would be your hard drive setup to record 48 track (live show) during 3 straight hour of recording? Could one 7200 RPM drive could do it till the end or do I really need SAS drive?

Any thought or experience ?

Mat

BradLyons · Post by **BradLyons** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 2:13 am

Track Count for long files isn't really the issue, it's about track-count v/s edit density (the amount of little files in a single track). Of course, some drives are worse than others for streaming. This is actually one area where, on paper, USB2 looks great...but in reality, blows! Firewire works well, providing the drive is properly powered or you can get glitches (the nature of cheap drives).

If you're using an internal SATA hard-drive, you can do 48-tracks of 48kHz recording on a single drive, but my rule of thumb is 32-tracks per drive to play it safe providing the computer can handle the over-head. I do as many as 48-tracks per Glyph firewire drive in my GT103 chassis, but I'm also using ProToolsHD which takes a load off the computer's processing for pre-buffering of audio being written. Natively speaking, 32-tracks should be fine. What are you using right now?

Macinbowl · Post by **Macinbowl** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 5:22 am

Right now I'm using Lacie quad interface drive on the fw400 port of my MBP. I'm recording LIVE show with a FF800 (on the fw800 port) but I never record more than 28 track. It'a the FF800 on a single interface setup. I do more and more recording and I was looking fot upgrading my rig for larger project. I want to be able to mix my show and record it as easy as possible.

That slowly leads me to a ... VENUE system. I was planning to get Mac Pro equiped with SAS drive but it take a PCI slot for the raid card. If I'm going to go with Protools, I think I just go with a HD|3 right away ( I want to go surround ) and more processing power is always welcome. But the downside of this is that it take all the availlable PCI slot on the machine and I don't really want to go with an expenssion chassis. That's extra money again and I would like to tour with a minimum of gear and it's an additionnal 4 space I can't really afford ( I often work in small place where less gear is more air to breath! ).

So, what are your suggestion? Is internal 7200 drive are enough? I was planning split my recordings in two drive anyway. What about the expension chassis? Really worth it?

SixStringGeek · Post by **SixStringGeek** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 6:35 am

Macinbowl wrote:I was planning to get Mac Pro equiped with SAS drive but it take a PCI slot for the raid card.

You can always set up software raid. If you're just recording straight to disk, setting up a couple drives in striping mode ought to get you there.