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Midlandmorgan 1 August 2005

{Disclaimer: I am almost too embarrassed to ask this in public...}

I have several drives being used for various stages of in progress/archive...some are integral USB or FW drives (take em out of the box, plug them in, and they work well), while others are merely transports or sleds for standard IDE drives that must be physically placed into the carrier, then the carrier is plougged in for use.

But I have noticed a difference in speed/disc usage with these differing types...The ADS USB drive for example works like a charmer, with a 160G drive inside partiitioned to 3 separate drives, but is a gargantuan pain in the butt to swap out drives when needed. whereas an older ADS FW drive is a nightmare in terms of performance and reliability...I also have an Iomega USB drive that is obscenely slow, and bogs down when dealing with over 15 tracks.

So the nerd of the week questions are:
1. Are there any reliable, fast, 7200/8 (or 16) M cache drives available already encased in their own sleds/carriers?
2. Given your choice, what specific brands have worked well for you when dealing with high track counts?

I have been running all current audio projects back and forth between a secondary internal drive and said externals, but on large projects, the transfer time from one to the other, then back again when finished, can be. insanely time consuming.

Thoughts?

Comments

Opus2000 Mon, 08/01/2005 - 09:22

In the long run internal drives on their own IDE controller channel should work better than any external drive in the long run. Partitioning a drive is not going to help a drive run better in any way as you're basically making one drive work harder than it needs to by constantly going back and forth to several sections of the drive really quickly!

I use Western Digital JB(8MB Cached drives) all around...one 40GB as the OS drive and two 80GB in KingWin Removable bay carriers and they work like a charm and have been working like a charm for well over 3 years now.

If you were to go external I would recommend Firewire drives. If anything go with Lacie as they are rock solid in terms of reliability!

http://www.lacie.com/

USB and CDROM reading are one of the two top CPU performance hogs for your machine so I would not doubt if you had problems with USB based external drives. Firewire is still more robust than USB as well IMHO. Especially if you use Firewire800!! 8-)

Also remember that you do NOT need to install any software for external drives. The software/drivers you install the more likely you will come across issues that will and can cause performance problems. Windows XP is more than sufficient to detect and operate external drives properly!

Opus :D

Midlandmorgan Mon, 08/01/2005 - 16:22

Thanks, Opus...

So if I read it right, you have two sleds you can swap audio drives in and out at will...I assume they are IDE?

FWIW: the issue really isn't stability, etc...I found out a long time ago that FW drives are really OK, but internal drives are the pathway to stable, reliable, etc...but what a pain to move files around....

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