How many tracks do you need?

Bill

About 48 tracks? Is it too much for a DAW??

IDE works fine. SCSI is good but overrated. IDE is catching up to SCSI with ATA 133 and above. price vs performace, IDE cleans the floor.

I'm using 2 EIDE HD's & 1 SCSI HD all housed in a rack server case. Works exceptionally well for me. I have'nt tried maxing it out to see how many tracks it's capable of, but did get a chance to record a friend who stacked 10 tracks of vocals (@24bit, 44.1k) along with a few other audio tracks without a glitch. It's very, very stable.

Since the days of the old overclocked Celeron, we've been able to get 40 tracks or better.... and I'm talking about 40 full continuous tracks... on a single IDE drive. Now we're up to about 80. I spent tons on a fibrechannel SAN, for no reason. For years I had SCSI setups, because there was no reliable alternative. Now, you just slam in a standard under $200 drive and record. Stop worrying about it, unless you are one of those people who can't edit, can't make a decision, and has no clue; or in the VERY rare case where you are actually in the position of having to record more than 48 tracks at once. The rest of us can just relax and record.

Bill

Kinda off topic:
I have two ATA100 drives, one is my audio drive and one is my OS and app storage. 7200 rpm, I don't know about cache, but its not real big.....
I find when I get up to around 24 tracks (with effects) I start getting disk speed errors.....I wonder if splitting the session save folder between the two drives will speed up access, or is the bus still too slow for that to make any difference?
The rest of my system: AMD Athlon 900, S$%tty via chipset, Logic 5.5.1, Aardvark Q10 blahblahblah.....

Hmmm, not knowing all of your specifics... I'd hazard a guess that perhaps you've reached the limit of your HDD cache. It just sounds like a buffer-under-run error to me. That, or you have one of your ATA100 drives on the same channel as a slower optical drive, etc. I've been able to record with a lesser CPU and it always came down to my RAM or HDD cache.

this is not really a reply, I am seeing you guys write about 40 tracks at a time. Does that mean that you actually have a card that has 40 inputs recording at the same time? I am new to this recording thing so bare with me. on another note, why would you have 40 mics running on one band? I am confused

If you're really paranoid about HDD speed, get yourself a Western Digital 10,000RPM Raptor. These are available in 36 & 74 Gig models and are seriously fast HDD's. You'll need a spare SATA channel though cause they don't come in standard 40pin Parallel ATA.

Approx 339 tracks @ 16bit 44.1 using DiskBench :D

Hi BladeSG,

Is this the DiskBench (DskBench) program that you are talking about:

Starting at: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/downloads.nsf/category?openview&count=10000

scroll down to the Utility Disk section and click on DskBench which should take you to:
http://www.prorec.com/prorec/downloads.nsf/filename/A1BABB1A8929148B862565D30064E895

Fozz wrote: Hi BladeSG,

Is this the DiskBench (DskBench) program that you are talking about:

Starting at: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/downloads.nsf/category?openview&count=10000

scroll down to the Utility Disk section and click on DskBench which should take you to:
http://www.prorec.com/prorec/downloads.nsf/filename/A1BABB1A8929148B862565D30064E895

Yes this is the one I used to test the Raptor.