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I run a mix plus on a quicksilver 733 with atto SCSI ultra and two IDE drives - what about firewire?

I heard you can only run 24 tracks from a firewire drive... true?
Is firewire as fast as a SCSI ultra (...10`000 rpm)

what are you working with? :cool:

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Ted Nightshade Sun, 04/07/2002 - 17:27

Here's a quote from Jamie McVannan at Glyph.
I don't see any harm in posting it.
" I would be inclined to steer
you from a FireWire solution and toward a SCSI solution. The reason being is
that FireWire is great for up to 32 tracks, 24 bit at 48 khz. When you
increase the speed from 48 khz to 96 or greater, the current bandwidth
limitations associated with FireWire limits your track counts, etc. Quite
simply, FireWire is fine for 48 khz or less. There are several companies
currently working on the next generation of FireWire which will allow for
higher speed recording and editing, but until then, SCSI is the only option
available(recommended). Audio is very speed intensive, and the higher drive
speed (10k or 15K) of SCSI is superior to the lower drive speed of
FireWire(7200 rpm)."

I don't know to what extent firewire is really improvable, so I don't know how long this will be the case.
Ted

teddancin Tue, 04/09/2002 - 03:29

I have to say that I strongly disagree with that. SCSI's perfomance is only slightly better than firewire's. SCSI has better sustained times (not by much), and it's access time is slightly faster. Overall, SCSI usually goes at about 40MB/sec and Firewire will go at about 35MB/sec. I really don't feel that it justifies the extra 400 bucks or whatever it costs extra for SCSI. Though very stable and solid, I just don't think that SCSI is worth it, especially with the advances being made with IDE drives. If it were my money, I'd buy the latest IDE HDD, cause they're much cheaper and practically as good as SCSI.

Also, as to how they could improve firewire. Well, fire wire's connection bandwidth is about 40MB/s, and firewire2 is coming out (just like USB 2). It's going to have a bandwidth of around 80MB/s. Much faster than the hard drive could send information, but with advancing technologies it probably won't be long before a firewire2 hard drive can transfer at speeds a bit over 40MB/s.

-Julian Standen
Don't feel foolish for purchasing those SCSI drives! You now own the best on the market, and they're very durable/sturdy drives. Hawt-swap kicks ass... You obviously paid through the nose for it, but that's what you have to do for the best. I personally wouldn't have bought them cause they're so expensive, but if you can afford it, again, nothing's really better (well, short of a ramdrive, but if you think SCSI's expensive then don't even look at the RAM drives).