anyone recording to exteranal firewire drives?

[t-rave]

How is the performance....

It would be neat to record to a external firewire drive instead of opening my pc to install new drives ...I know for a laptop it's pretty much the only way..I was just wondering if it can handle 8 tracks at a time...

Thanks

 

[fabz]

I think this should work fine!

I did 12 Tracks with USB2 and a friend of mine did 16 Tracks on Firewire so i think you're fine. Just Make sure you have enough RAM at least 512 (works fine for me) but i'm gonna upgrade soon to 2 GB.

 

[James Murphy]

i routinely record up to 14 tracks at once during drum tracking (10-13 for drums, 1 for scratch guitar or bass) at 44.1/24 on my little 80GB Glyph Pro GT050 FW400 drive on my mobile rig (Mac 17" Powerbook/Motu 828mk2 i/o)... firewire drives are robust enough to handle even more than this, as long as your computer's processor is up to it.

 

[t-rave]

thanks for the input..that seems pretty encouraging because I am going to do some remote recording and it just seems easier to plug in to my main daw to mix.... If this works out I think I will use an external for all future tracking!

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

I've succesfully recorded (as a test) 24 tracks at 44.1KHz/24 bits for more than an hour without any drop of whatever, on a USB 2.0 disk and I'm pretty confident the Firewire 400 is even more robust.

 

[Nitronium Blood]

Did somebody say exteranal?

 

[Impy]

Finally! I was waiting for someone to comment on that

 

[Nitronium Blood]

Finally! I was waiting for someone to comment on that

 

[James Murphy]

I've succesfully recorded (as a test) 24 tracks at 44.1KHz/24 bits for more than an hour without any drop of whatever, on a USB 2.0 disk and I'm pretty confident the Firewire 400 is even more robust.

actually Firewire 400 is 400mbps and USB 2.0 is 480mbps. not sure if that is the only relevant spec, but i post anyway just to illustrate that USB 2.0 is much more robust than you might think.

 

[Frank'nfurter]

On my Laptop solution 20 tracks from RME Digiface direct to FW HD. No problem.

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Yep, USB 2.0 is theoretically faster than Firewire, but actually it's not. I've seen a lot of benchmarks showing that in real life file copy tests, Firewire 400 outperforms USB 2.0 every single time. Also (and maybe this is the reason of its superiority), I've always been told that FW is more reliable for audio and USB because the flow of data is constant.
But as you said, USB 2.0 is reliable in most cases anyway.

 

[t-rave]

Other than James' glyph what brands are you guys using? Or are you buying drives and putting them in enclosures?

 

[Brett - K A L I S I A]

Because my Lacie tri-interface (USB 2.0 / FW 400 / FW 800) didn't arrive at the shop in time I had to buy a Maxtor and put it in a USB 2.0 / Firewire 400 external box.

 

[Jeremy Krull]

hmmm

Well since like 2001 I've been using Glyph's hot swap Ultra SCSI drives (18gb and 36gb), and I LOVE those, they never fail, ever. Super reliable. When I left for school, I would be using a laptop, so I purchased a Maxtor One-Touch 200GB FW drive. Most of the time it worked alright, for real-time recording. Eventually it got slower and slower with response and seek times, until eventually the head destroyed itself and I had to have the drive recovered. So now, I keep FW's for high-volume backup, and I might start using Glyph's GT-Key drives later on.

 

[_RiseInside_]

i use the lacie triple interface 160 gb 7200 rpm. It´s rock solid and reliable. Well...it´s a maxtor on the inside.

 

[_RiseInside_]

ups...double post

 

[Kazrog]

I still use Firewire 400 drives exclusively for recording, but I am going to be installing a second SATA drive in my G5 soon because it's the new trend. Still, I've never had a problem with Firewire 400 drives and I've done pretty ambitious stuff with them.

My producer has even had track counts of 100+ in PTHD sessions on Firewire 400 drives with no problems. And that was on the G4, before he got a G5!