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I am studying bird vocalizations and will be setting up an array of 24 mono mics (8 each into a total of 3 896 or 896HD's). We will be recording in DP 4.52 on a powerbook, and eventually exporting sounbites for analysis to other programs. Our plan was to record to an external HD (we'll have several to many GB/day of recording, so best not to put this on the internal drive).

I just realized that our powerbook has only one firewire port, and we were planning on having the external drive connected via firewire. Can we put the HD in the daisychain with the 3 motus? Does it matter where it is in the chain (at the end, or closest to the computer)? Would a USB 2.0 drive be fast enough for 24 channels, 44.1 khz sampling at 16 or 24 bits?

I tested chaining a firewire drive to my firewire interface. Played audio, while copying gigabytes of files to the external drive as a test. The audio did not break up or stutter, and the data was copied without problems.

But 1) I'm not recording, 2) I'm not using 24 channels, 3) I'm not using multiple firewire interfaces.

So I don't know if that helps you or not.

Why don't you do some testing in the office before going out in the field?

We will definitely be testing as much as time allows (which isn't as much as I'd like). I was mainly asking because I was placing an order for the external drive, but ended up getting a 7200rpm maxtor with both firewire and usb2 so we could connect it either way.

Thanks

Alan