Originally posted by tull:
Dedric, What's the best hard drive to get for Paris?

Thanks,
John

ATA66/100 and 7200 IDE drives. With newer PCs/Macs and faster IDE buses, the Maxtor Diamondmax plus drives (7200 rpm/ATA66 or ATA100) are the most popular and are streaming more tracks than SCSI systems. With PCs there is an issue with actually running a drive at ATA100, and I believe most people are configuring for ATA66. ATA100 seemed to run slower (likely a motherboard IDE bus issue).

I found an article in Macworld that spec'd the new Seagate Barracuda ATA 100 drives about 80% faster in some tests than the Maxtors. I don't know of anyone that has used them yet, but since the are about the same price ($180 or so for 40G) maybe worth a try (IBM drives have a good track record also). Stay with 7200rpm and ATA 66 or better either way.

Regards,
Dedric
Dedric

Have 10k rpm drives been tested with Paris? Or the new 15k's?

I don't know if anyone has or not. I would be interested in the results. The main conclusion that most Paris users I know (including myself) have come to is that for price and performance, the ATA's are by far the best buy. A single 7200 rpm can handle over 80 tracks, and considering the cost of U2W, fiber channel and U160 SCSI systems, ATA66/100 is sort of hard to beat.

Dedric

Brian T. recently reported doing 128 live tracks with Paris off a single Maxtor 7200 60 gig drive. I can't remember the exact setup, but it was something like playing 104 while recording 24.

He's obviously insane, but he must really have the world's largest DAW, and all off of a drive that costs a few hundred bucks. Amazing.

Andy

What kind of buffering time to you have to wait before it starts playing, especially when you have that many tracks?

I have only a 2-card system, so the highest number tracks I have played back at once are 44 (32 tracks + 6 stereo submixes), but in this configuration and a 80 meg disk cache I have never noticed a lag of any kind. I'm using a 5400 rpm Maxtor 60 gig slave on a G4.

Andy

Second the motion
Maxtor 7200's, I have two 20GB and a 30GB, one for OS's (multiple boot partitions) and two for audio and video data. Best for the price and as Bian T can testify, good enough.
And as for price, I'd get the smaller ones, more cost efective (30GB) at around $100 US, though I saw a 60GB out now, its all changing fast, I've seen people trying to sell 20GB models for the same as a 30GB. A simple calc will tell you $/GB. Look at the local stores sale prices and compare to the "mail-order" (don't forget to add shipping) with pricewatch.com. Make sure they have the larger on board cache, some of the 20's had 1 MB caches and some 2MB caches, big difference.

peace
Brian