I recently purchased 2 WD800JB 80G drives from Fry's. They were $140 with a $40 rebate and a 3 year warranty (try to find one of those lately) so I figured I couldn't go wrong.

No problems with either of 'em so far. They are doing about 30MBps PR/PW as singles on a Tempo Trio card in my PM8600.

:c:

Just bought an 80 gig and built a firewire drive using the pyro kit. Doing about 24mb/s on a p4 laptop. Is this good or should I be getting more?

The problem was with the mainboards on the drives crapping out. They have fixed the problem and are moving onward. At least they were able to get it done wuickly and not putz around with it like IBM did for sooooo many years!
As far as the laptop spped with firewire...that's about all you'll get as it's not going to truly give you that throughput just because it's on a firewire port. Remember that the firewire is within the PCI bus and will bog down at certain bandwidths!
Cheers
Opus

Speaking of moving onward, Opus....Has any news of the arrival of the new 16Mg cache drives graced your presence? I've only heard rumors, but you always seem to have a death-grip on the "here and now." lol

16MB cached drives? Man, I have not yet heard a single thing about that :D

Hi again Opus! I'm back and so are you! That makes me happy!
I've had some bad luck... My lovely ANUS-DAW had been running for a few weeks and then my OS-drive crashed (Segate 60 GB) *sigh* .
Since I've heard about the better performance of also having a 8 Mb-cache OS-drive I thought I'd buy a WD 40 or 60 Gb (8 Mb-Cache) HD. BUT, it will takes months before those are availble here in Sweden. So I had this dilemma: Should I go for a WD 120 Gb (8MB-cache) or 40 Gb (2Mb-cache) for my new OS-drive? I went for the 120 GB (8 Mb)... Did I make the right decision? Is there any disadvantage of having such a large OS-drive?
Of course it takes much longer time to defrag it.
But beside that? Is it worth the trouble to replace it with a 40 Gb drive when I can get my hands on one of them?

Hey Tore
At that point I would definitely stick with the 120GB and partition it so that the OS and Apps are on a 20GB partition and use a couple of more partitions for samples and so forth.
Sorry to hear about your other drive man! Some drives are just bad....sucks that way!
Cheers
Opus

Thank you OPUS for the reply. You've been so helpful. When I started this DAW-building project it was mainly for my own songwriting I was going to use it.... but tomorrow I will do my first real recording on it. I will record violins for a single...Scary :eek: ... I hope the HD's won't crash again.

Now that I got system almost complete(hardware) and have the 40 and 120 wd drives, my question is this:

Where should I install Atmoshere and Stylus? These both have 3gb plus of audio/midi files. Would I install on the OS DRIVE OR THE audio drive? A srperate partition on the OS drive?

Well, I actually install that myself on the OS drive. Since it's 40GB why not! Not like you are going to fill 40GB worth of OS and Applications now are you! lol
You could partition the OS drive but it's just not needed IMHO
Opus :D

Good point! :roll:

Thanks for the response Opus. Guess that would be the smart thing anyways if I am going to image the OS. :c:

Cheers.