MOTUnation.com

Hey guys, hope you are all well....

I have a lacie biggest s2s box with 5 removable 500GB drives in it - the box is connected to a Lacie PCIx card.

The drivers had known issues with snow leopard - causing irrational OS behaviour including kernal panics and freezes. There has been one driver update and the problems never quite went away - I've been having huge issues with my setup and I suspect this card may still be to blame for some of them, i'd also like multiple individual drives so I can plug them into something else if I need to (a laptop).

So - I need 4-5 drives to spread my sample / VI libraries over and I was thinking of daisy chaining 4 Glyph GT 050Q FW800 drives.

I also have an RME Fireface 800 interface - as all 4 FW800 ports on the mac pro share the same bus, will I need a FW800 card to prevent issues?

Also, do you think I'm barking up the right tree - I defiantly don't want a solution that requires third party drivers again if poss....

Looked briefly down the SSD route - still pretty pricy - wonder if I could fit all my most used libraries on a 256GB SSD......????

All advice gratefully received.

I have a FW800 drive with my samples, and a MOTU896 on the same FW bus(daisy chained)... One time I added a second FW drive and I experienced all kinds of problems with performance... Unfortunately the iMacs are not expandable so I'm screwed until I can get a MacPro... (4 freaking FW ports!!!!)

I wouldn't suggest daisy chaining more than 1 drive on the same bus if you're streaming lots of VI's...

Definitely look into a new FW port.

Let me know what you come up with and how it works. I need a better solution too

Unfortunately... your still going to saturate the FW buss. The OP doesn't say what kind of Mac he's using but since he has a PCIX card... must be a G5. WD Velociraptors are very hard to beat and you can get 600 GB versions which are very fast. You could go SSD but the G5's SATA ll controller (1.5 Gb/s compared to the newer SATA 3 @ 3 Gb/s) wouldn't give you any more benefit than just going with a WD velociraptor.
Yes, an SSD reads are going to smoke anything out there but for the capacity you need, a WDVR is fine. I'd stay away from the FW bus as much as possible. Sure you can use it but there is a saturation point and when you hit it, you'll wish you didn't.

Okay guys are you ready for this one? This is the one case when I'm going to say...NOT TO BUY GLYPH (yikes, I really did say it). IMHO this is where internal SATA drives will be more ideal such as Seagate drives.

Thanks for the opinions... sorry I forgot to mention my spec:
Mac Pro 8x 2.93 Nehalem, 20GB RAM ( http://www.goodsounds.co.uk/work.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; )

I have 4 internal drives - and some libraries spread across them - but I wanted external solutions to spread the load further and also so that I can swap libraries easily onto different machines.

The current gen mac pro has 4 FW 800 ports - but they are all on the same bus - some have reported no issue with this running several drives but I've never seen it for myself.

so - what if I get a sonnet card (2x fw800 2xusb) and have 2 Glyphs on each sonnet port...?

Or do you really think I should keep all my libraries internal and use external for the other stuff......?

Cheers guys - I'm glad I didn't rush into buying just yet.

Stu

I use my internal SATA drives for VIDEO production and my VI's and libraries. I have a Glyph GT103 with hot-swap drives I use for my audio. I'm going to be adding (3) 2TB internal drives for VI's and video. IMHO, stick with that...do as large as you can if you have that much stuff. I would be surprised if you have more software than I have---cuz I gotz cuhnextions (legally, too).

Thanks for the tips - I'm looking now to unload all my storage off the internal drives and use these for VI's - after reading what you guys have said it makes more sense now to use external drives for file storage / backups etc and internal drives for working data.

I've got a fair bit of software but I try my best to keep it to a bare minimum - 'Patch search syndrome' can severely hinder productive creative output. I always feel its best to have a small palette of tools that you know well than 1000's of plugins and utilities that you barely scratch the surface of.

Get anything except La Cie. In the production environments I have used them they are notorious for failing badly. La Cie are made to look nice with a mac, not perform well or be robust.
I like Seagate and Hitachi drives in most uses.
The WD raptor series is nice, but kinda pricey. They are also kinda hot and loud.