Advice on external HD for VI's

[wonder]

I have 2 VI drives that house my samples. One is internal and one is an external FW 800 Lacie drive. Both are getting full and I'm in need of buying a third drive and was wondering if anyone had advice on a good external drive. I'm thinking of combining drive 2 and (future) 3 so I don't have so many drives.

Any thoughts on make/model/size? FW vs USB?

My computer is an older QUAD Mac Pro. (no thunderbolt).

I don't run a TON of VI's at once. At tops, it's Kontakt with 8 channels and maybe Trilian or Omnisphere all at once. I'm not doing movie score size VI work at once. I do use VI's on every sessions but the instances at once I try to keep to a minimum.

Any suggestions?

[mikehalloran]

Get a PCIe card that supports eSATA multi port or usb3. Either is lots faster and more robust than FW. With eSATA, usb3 and TB, platter speed restricts your data transfer with mechanical drives. Housings and docks are inexpensive these days.

Which to get? It depends on your budget and what version of the MP you have. The MacPro 1.1 has a speed bottleneck on the PCIe bus but you can still get 3G transfer rates via eSATA. A multi port card hooked up to a $100 splitter lets you connect four or five docks that, last I checked, could be bought for $20 each and come with cables. The drives drop in and can be configured RAID or JBOD (each shows up separately).

3G eSATA is about 3.5 times the max speed of FW 800. USB 3 is rated about 5 times. 6G eSATA about 8x and so on.

Multi port is not supported on all eSATA cards, btw. You can attach four splitters for a total of 20 drives to one card. Just saying...

3.1 and later Mac Pros can get 6g transfer speeds through eSATA. Yes, even though the internal SATA bus is limited to 3G, the PCIe bus breaks that bottleneck. The hardware is more expensive but readily available.

Usb3 cards should work on the MP 1.1 but it is still limited by the PCIe bus speed so it's faster than FW but cannot reach the full spec (USB never does anyway).

[frankf]

Mike,
I have a 2-port 6g eSata card in my MP 3,1and am wondering if the bus speed gets halved with a card like this or quartered with a 4 port card or splitter. Do you have any idea? Thanks.
Frank


Frank Ferrucci

[Tobor]

Now that I just placed an order for another external FW drive (get'em while they last), I'm also curious about external solutions for iMac. I have two FW drives (full) with 828 on my FW port, and a combo Time Machine/SL partition FW drive with Thunderbolt adaptor. I'll use my other Thunderbolt port for the new drive with a second adaptor.

My current thinking is that I will be able to combine my VI drives onto the new 3T My Book with room to spare, then use one of the current VI drives for audio.

Would love an SSD drive for some of this but too expensive with all the libraries I have.

Are USB 3.0 drives being used for VIs/audio these days? It seems there were some problems mentioned quite a while back and I'm curious as to the current state of things.

[mikehalloran]

Mike,
I have a 2-port 6g eSata card in my MP 3,1and am wondering if the bus speed gets halved with a card like this or quartered with a 4 port card or splitter. Do you have any idea? Thanks.
Frank

It doesn't work that way. If your PCIe card doesn't support Port Multiplier, you are limited to the the two physical ports. If it does, then the splitter must support 6G -- but if it does, all 4 or 5 ports will be 6G. If it supports 3G only, you are limited to that downstream.

I bought an Addonics 5x1 Port Multiplier not knowing that the eSATA port on my iMac does not support the PM protocol. Oooops. According to the box, it supports 3G and 1.5G only. I keep meaning to sell that someday.

[HCMarkus]

PM is cool, but note that the combined bandwidth for simultaneous reads from all PM drives is limited to the SATA port speed. So, for top performance, don't PM too many HDs (or any SSDs.)

[macnylonguitar]

Not sure if this is the correct thread, but was looking for a place to post this info

I am a long time Apple systems engineer, having worked at Apple HQ in Cupertino as a QA engineer, as well as DP user and Spectrasonics user (guitar synth).

Not sure about Spectrasonics forums, but it looks like it has not been updated since 2011, what's up with that?

If anyone knows what is the main Spectrasonics forum?

So here we go. Having all of ones files: DP projects, audio files, and sound libraries, etc., Omnisphere being over 50 plus GB, to say nothing of Trilian and Stylus RMX, on the same OS X boot volume is not efficient.

So now your OS X boot volume is at least 50 GB plus OS X which is about 20 GB.

Even with the new Haswell MBPs and with 256 GB Flash HD, 70-80 GB of data on a boot volume is kind of silly.

Not to mention if you have to re-image, good luck, your image is 70 plus GB and is going to take some time to come across even with Thunderbolt / USB 3.

I have my Omnisphere Library on a separate Lacie TB / USB 1 TB drive (with partitions), and use a Symbolic Links to this volume.

In terminal type: ln -s <sourcepathofspectrafolder> <targetpathofspectrafolder>

/Library/Application Support/Spectrasonics

Where Spectrasonics is the Sym Link

There is also a path in ~/Library/Application Support/Spectrasonics/Spectrasonics/STEAM

Where STEAM is the Sym Link

Then you just install the Omnisphere pkg files and wa la, done. When you open DP and get an Omni instance, all works fine, pops up just fine.

All on the latest MBP 15" Haswell, with 10.9.1 Mavericks

If you have any questions feel free to email me, macnylonguitar at iCloud dot com, and I'll send you the instructions, basically screen shots of the paths

peace, macnylonguitar

[wonder]

Would getting a PCIe card for an SSD drive be faster or better than just buying an SSD drive and a chassis for one of the drive bays in the Mac Pro?

My Mac Pro is 1,1 (first Gen...2007).

I did just notice this on OWC

2006-2007 Mac Pro
These models utilize PCIe 1.0 slot which cannot be configured (even with the Expansion Utility in OS X) to address Accelsior_E2 as anything but as a first generation one-lane card. As a result, Accelsior_E2 performance will be limited to 190-200MB/s data rates. If maximum data rate speed up to 285MB/s is desired, we recommend the installation of a 2.5" OWC Mercury SSD in an open Mac Pro drive bay.

I'm sure i have a PCIe 1.0 slot so data rates using my drive bay might be better?

[mikehalloran]

James has firsthand experience with this issue.

Other than that, a 3G SSD in a bay seems to be the recommendation.

[wonder]

James has firsthand experience with this issue.

Other than that, a 3G SSD in a bay seems to be the recommendation.

James, care to chime in?

I'm doing to research on if the PCIe 1 slots with an SSD drive will be faster than SATA SSD. Obviously the PCIe 2 would BLAZE but my rusty old PCI 1 ... the SSD in the bay (SATA) might be the way to go.

[wonder]

I think I'll go with this...
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal ... olid_State

I've read GREAT things about it.

When i do, do you guys recommend cloning my current OS drive or starting from scratch?

Although, i might upgrade to Mountain Lion (but I'll lose my Pro Tools 9) in which case I guess I'll have to start from scratch ... ?

[HCMarkus]

You can use a SATAIII drive in a SATAII drive bay just fine. Access speed will be limited to SATAII speeds, but will still be very fast. For boot (OS) drive, most reads are very small and, as I understand it, most SATAIII SSD's won't be constrained by the Mac Pro SATAII speed limitation.

If access to a single SATA drive is all that is required, and you want SATAIII speed, you can get a bootable PCIe 1x card for about $15.00...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SATA3-SATA- ... 0657164207

There are other models that allow you to select two internal or two external SATA ports, or one of each, via jumpers...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Flex-2-port-SAT ... 7164207%26

Cards with the ASM1061 Chipset are Mac-compatible. Because these cards don't use more than a PCIe 1x slot, they won't give you full SATAIII speed from more than a single simultaneous drive. I have a card with this chipset and stream samples from it. I keep the second SATA port available for eSATA use when clients bring drives in

PS: My Mac boots in less than 10 seconds after the boot screen is displayed. DP projects and samples all reside on SSD's too, so it is no big deal to reboot if anything gets wonky in mid-session.

[wonder]

You can use a SATAIII drive in a SATAII drive bay just fine. Access speed will be limited to SATAII speeds, but will still be very fast. For boot (OS) drive, most reads are very small and, as I understand it, most SATAIII SSD's won't be constrained by the Mac Pro SATAII speed limitation.

If access to a single SATA drive is all that is required, and you want SATAIII speed, you can get a bootable PCIe 1x card for about $15.00...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SATA3-SATA- ... 0657164207

There are other models that allow you to select two internal or two external SATA ports, or one of each, via jumpers...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Flex-2-port-SAT ... 7164207%26

Cards with the ASM1061 Chipset are Mac-compatible. Because these cards don't use more than a PCIe 1x slot, they won't give you full SATAIII speed from more than a single simultaneous drive. I have a card with this chipset and stream samples from it. I keep the second SATA port available for eSATA use when clients bring drives in

PS: My Mac boots in less than 10 seconds after the boot screen is displayed. DP projects and samples all reside on SSD's too, so it is no big deal to reboot if anything gets wonky in mid-session.

Great points.
So, as I'm understanding it, regardless of whether I choose SATA or PCIe SSD, I won't be getting FULL speed usage from the SSD capabilities due to my SATA II and PCIe 1 limitations in my Mac Pro 1.1?
That's ok with me ... I just want to get the FASTEST possible SSD situation for my system drive and get noticeably faster responses and overall better performance.

There are opinions that SATA SSD is the way to go and PCIe SSD won't work in my system. Others say just the opposite.
I guess it's just a matter of which way I want to go now?

I plan on investing in more RAM as well.

[HCMarkus]

Way more bang for the buck with a SATA SSD. Try it. You'll like it.

If you have the coin to invest in PCIe SSD, upgrade your Mac first!

[mikehalloran]

While you won't maximize the potential of SSD on your MP v1.1, it will still be a significant performance upgrade.