FW400 fast enough for tracking?

[[UEAK]Clowd]

seems to be conflicting opinions about this all over the web.. some people say you need FW800.

I'm trying to figure out a solution so I can track @ the studio (on a mac) with firewire and then bring it home to my PC and use eSATA... but maybe it would be cheaper just to get a firewire PCI card for my PC

 

[JeffTD]

For harddrive speeds? Totally. USB 2.0 is fast enough, even.

 

[DigitalMetal]

yes it is, ive been tracking drums the last few weeks with a firewire 400 drive on a Mac G4 running PT TDM

16 tracks at 24bit/44Khz without a whisper of complaint from the drive, disk meter in PT showing about 20%.

The sustained transfer rate (constant streaming) of a FW400 drive is about 40-60 Mb/s

Firewire 400 means the protocol is designed to work with a max transfer rate of 400Mb/s but in reality for constant streaming you are looking at the figures i mentioned above.

 

[[UEAK]Clowd]

cool.

alternatively, how much of a pain in the ass would it be to hook this mac up with eSATA? its a dual quad-core mac pro.

 

[DigitalMetal]

You dont mention your DAW platform so be aware if you are using ProTools that Avid still dont officially support/approve USB drive usage and you may get slight performance problems, it does work, ive used USB2 but it also has glitched for me at times.
Also USB" although has a higher theoretical max transfer rate than FW at 480Mb/s its sustained/streaming transfer rates are lower usually 30-50 -ish Mb/s plus there are far more cheap shitty USB chipsets out there with lower performance.

Id always try and get drive enclosures that use Oxford semiconductor chipsets for best performance.

 

[DigitalMetal]

You'll need a PCIe (PCI Express) eSATA card

 

[JeffTD]

In a Mac Pro, eSata will be easy. I run it all the time on my MBP with an expresscard34 eSata card.

 

[mva801]

There's just one problem. You can't use the same drive for Mac and PC recording. It has to be formatted for one or the other. Are you thinking of using a hard drive at the studio, then transferring it to your PC, and recording with an internal drive? Or transferring from the Mac formatted drive to a PC formatted external?

Macs can't write to PC formatted drives without special software. Which you can get for free actually...

 

[jangoux]

Yes, you can if they're fat32 or you use any ntfs or hfs driver on either osx or windows.

 

[[UEAK]Clowd]

There's just one problem. You can't use the same drive for Mac and PC recording. It has to be formatted for one or the other. Are you thinking of using a hard drive at the studio, then transferring it to your PC, and recording with an internal drive? Or transferring from the Mac formatted drive to a PC formatted external?

Macs can't write to PC formatted drives without special software. Which you can get for free actually...

I just want to mix @ home, no tracking.

but yeah I ran into this problem while trying to back some stuff up a while ago - luckily I found that freeHFS driver or whatever it is.

 

[[UEAK]Clowd]

In a Mac Pro, eSata will be easy. I run it all the time on my MBP with an expresscard34 eSata card.

damn son, the pcie ones are expensive. probably cheaper just to get a firewire card for the PC haha.

 

[DigitalMetal]

My record drive is formatted Mac HFS and i track in the Studio on a OSX G4 Mac and take it home and copy the data to my PC project drive to edit.

Protools 8 and 9 install a MacDrive Plugin on the PC during installation to allow read and write to mac format drives,

I have tracked on the PC using the mac drive and it worked but id still copy it over to a PC drive for stability sake

 

[DigitalMetal]

Yup everything for Mac is expensive lol
you dont need any faster than fw400 unless you are tracking more than 48 tracks at once or streaming higher than HD quality video off it,
I'd stick with Firewire if i were you, if you are getting a card get one with a Texas Instruments Chipset for best compatibility/performance.
Belkin, ADS Tech, or SIIG make them.

 

[[UEAK]Clowd]

thanks man.

one last question - do you think i can get away with using one drive for both recording to and playing samples from? (drum samples, sample libraries, etc)

 

[Trevoire520]

This might go against what Avid say but I find it's actually more stable to record to the internal drive of my Macbook than it is to record to my external firewire drive. So recently I've been doing that and then transferring to my external drive once tracking is done.

Drive is a WD Mybook that does 7200RPM and is daisy chained from my Profire 2626. Maybe I should try plugging in the drive first and daisy chaining the PF from that?

 

[DigitalMetal]

No probs,

Yes should be fine if its something fairly lightweight like Slate SSD, Trigger, drumagog or EZ Drummer, if its something hefty like BFD or Superior then give it a try it may well be ok but id say thats the boarderline between needing seperate drives,

Althought they should be ok if you set them to load on demand and buffer through RAM in the Programs preferences.

Give it a try anyhow, wont hurt to see what happens on a test run

 

[[UEAK]Clowd]

No probs,

Yes should be fine if its something fairly lightweight like Slate SSD, Trigger, drumagog or EZ Drummer, if its something hefty like BFD or Superior then give it a try it may well be ok but id say thats the boarderline between needing seperate drives,

Althought they should be ok if you set them to load on demand and buffer through RAM in the Programs preferences.

Give it a try anyhow, wont hurt to see what happens on a test run

sometimes it gets a bit hefty with eastwest orchestra stuff but it'll probably be alright for now.

 

[DigitalMetal]

This might go against what Avid say but I find it's actually more stable to record to the internal drive of my Macbook than it is to record to my external firewire drive. So recently I've been doing that and then transferring to my external drive once tracking is done.

Drive is a WD Mybook that does 7200RPM and is daisy chained from my Profire 2626. Maybe I should try plugging in the drive first and daisy chaining the PF from that?

i have successfully used the internal drive on my PC Laptop too with PT but then one day it just refused to engage record saying could not write to drive fast enough or something to that effect and it was when i was trying to track a demo in the rehearsal studio,
Same thing happened with my drummers MacBook Pro 2 weeks ago.
It was rather embarrassing as you can imagine, so i think Avid are aware that its not 100% stable so they put a "not supported" stamp on it to minimise tech support enquiries.
A lot of stuff that is "not supported" may well work but its down to the individual if they choose to use it in that way and they wont get any help from Avid on the matter.

 

[DigitalMetal]

If you are using EWQLSO Gold or Platinum i would use them on a seperate drive,
To be honest if you are drum tracking get a drive just for that purpose rather than cluttering it up with sample libraries,
The odd few samples yeah fine, but hefty libraries, get a second drive.

 

[mva801]

Yes, you can if they're fat32 or you use any ntfs or hfs driver on either osx or windows.

I know OSX can write to FAT32 or use the NTFS drivers, but Pro Tools won't enable Fat32 or NTFS drives as record volumes on a mac, so you have to format it HFS. Looked it up and you can actually use the HFS option to playback and record from HFS drives on the PC, so I guess it will work that way. (didn't know that before. Never use PC's)

All I'm really saying is, make sure you format it correctly. I usually have people bring me ntfs formatted drives, then I have to record to a different one and transfer everything.