external drive..

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 8:56 pm

Need some recomendations on some hard drives...

-Needs to be firewire 800 or esata
-320gb-500gb
-Mac and PC compatible so I can take it studio to studio (important!)

recomendations on specific models etc...?

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2008 10:12 pm

I've always heard that Glyph was the best. I have a LaCie drive, which works with both Macs and PCs. The LaCie works quite well, even though my model is discontinued. Good prices too. Maybe a more knowledgable person can chime in Very Happy

. God bless.

Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 2:18 pm

Macintosh & PC compatible generally means a FAT 32 format. That's not necessarily the best format for PC. NTFS is! So I think your request is a bit on the uninformed side of things? After all, we all drive vehicles with 4 tires on them. This means however, a Chevy engine doesn't fit into a Ford. And a Ford engine doesn't fit into a Chevy. Make a selection! You can't be both a girl & boy unless you are born with a birth defect. So both, isn't necessarily desirable nor necessary. You can always dump from an NTFS formatted hard drive to a FAT 32 Hard Drive if necessary. Or, vice versa. Just like it doesn't make any sense to mix marriage with infidelity when you're marriage really needs high fidelity.

Divorced in stereo
Ms. Remy Ann David

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 6:57 am

Well I see where youre coming from there. I may just go with a seagate or western digital drive possibly. Dont wanna spend too much on a hard drive...I have been wondering though should I connect via esata or would firewire 800 be sufficient? I dont record more than 2 tracks at once, or more than 40 total...

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 4:50 pm

I really, really recommend spending the money for a good quality hard drive. The last thing you want is a malfunctioning or broken hard drive. The cheaper drives do tend to have issues over time.

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 7:05 pm

Is Lacie in the quality hard drive business? I had a bad experience with one of their drives and one of their scsi cd burners.

It is still difficult to talk about.

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 7:54 pm

I'd say LaCie drives are good quality. I've always been told by those in the recording business to buy a Glyph if you can, but a LaCie will get the job done. I've had my LaCie for over a year, and it gets used fairly often, and I haven't had any issues with it.

Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 8:04 pm

I've had very little trouble with Western Digital overall. (Aside from their 250 gig abomination EIDE drives, which everyone seemed to have the same problem with, about a year ago...they ALL seemed to die, the same way, around the same time...very strange.)

There are very few HD manufacturers out there now anyway; most are putting different names on the same core group of drive makers. (Quantum got out of the HD business a while ago, for example....)

SATA and ESATA seem to be the standard nowadays as well. Find a good reliable drive speed and size, and off you go. (72000 RPM has become almost universal for most drives now, except for the smaller pocket drives that are only running at 54000 RPM).

Aside from that, you can build your own remote & removable caddy from most off the shelf brands and stuff it with whatever you want; Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, etc. FW400 & USB 2 are just about the same, data-rate. FW800 is out there, but I don't know if you need that much throughput for what you're describing.

It's usually cheaper to just buy a few caddy's and remove the drives as they fill up. How may caddies, cables & power supplies does one really need anyway? I have a shelf FULL of big HDs; almost one per client, but only a handful of caddies. I'd never be able to afford it otherwise.

And of course, make sure you keep TWO copies going, on separate drives, at least while the project is underway. Once it's completed and mastered, you can exhale and perhaps just keep one copy on file on a HD. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble with no backups.

Learned the hard way. Wink

Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2008 12:50 am

I just got shipped 3 bad (out of the box) Western Digital Sata Drives about a month ago. 24 hours of troubleshooting later I returned them and bought Seagate. They work flawlessly as usual. I dont think I will buy Western D again....

Just my 2 cents.

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008 9:07 am

Well i've gotten a lot of recomendation to get seagate..that is if I were to get an external enclosure only like mentioned above..I think i'm gonna get a hard drive enclosure..with firewire800 and esata connections to my computer, and just go with a seagate 500gb internal drive to stick in it or something. thanks for all the help you all will come back if i have more questions

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008 10:46 am

I'm sure you mean 7200 and 5400.

I wouldn't mind a 72000rpm model. Smile

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008 4:24 pm

The 72Kspin-em-and-win-em models are noisy as NasCar and you can cook burgers on it.

When they say this hard drive is HOT they mean this hard drive is HOT!!!!

Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2008 3:39 pm

I have a techincal question for someone to answer...

My ASUS motherboard has PCI slots (32-bit), not the newer 64-bit PCI-X slots....The PCI has a transfer rate of 133 MB/sec and the PCI-X has 266MB/sec

my question is: If I am running esata in my PCI slot..which esata has a transfer rate of 3gb/sec, am I wasting my money on esata when the PCI card i'd have could only transfer 133 mb/sec? What if I were to use firewire 400, or firewire 800??? Would esata be any faster with a normal PCI?

Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2008 5:33 pm

Conventional PCI bus specifications
32-bit PCI Golfinger Voltage Visual Comparison
32-bit PCI Golfinger Voltage Visual Comparison

* 33.33 MHz clock with synchronous transfers
* Peak transfer rate of 133 MB per second for 32-bit bus width (33.33 MHz × 32 bits ÷ 8 bits/byte = 133 MB/s)
* 32-bit bus width
* 32-bit address space (4 gigabytes)
* 32-bit port space (now deprecated)
* 256-byte configuration space
* 3.3- or 5-volt signaling
* Reflected-wave switching

I am fairly certain that your firewire has to use the same bus as well.

But, If your getting 133MB/sec thats not a bad transfer rate. Look up some bench marks for some HDD's and then do a benchmark with your existing set up. I'm sure if you don't have any "other" problems they won't be that far off.

Just because the spec for sata is either 1GB/sec or 3GB/sec doesn't mean that you will get that.

Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2008 6:53 am

pfactionbrett wrote:

I have a techincal question for someone to answer...

My ASUS motherboard has PCI slots (32-bit), not the newer 64-bit PCI-X slots....The PCI has a transfer rate of 133 MB/sec and the PCI-X has 266MB/sec

my question is: If I am running esata in my PCI slot..which esata has a transfer rate of 3gb/sec, am I wasting my money on esata when the PCI card i'd have could only transfer 133 mb/sec? What if I were to use firewire 400, or firewire 800??? Would esata be any faster with a normal PCI?

Most eSATA PCI expansion cards will adapt to the bus they plug into (32bit/33MHz, 64/33, 64/66 and 64/133), but some will not work well at 32/33.

If your eSATA adaptor will run at extended rates, check that you do not have any conventional PCI cards on the same PCI bus segment, as the segment will run at the rate of the slowest card.

You would get better performance from a native FireWire interface, but not from a FireWire interface on a PCI card.

I would use the eSATA adaptor for now until you get a new computer that has native eSATA connectors.

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