Members Majoria Posted July 8, 2007 Members Share Posted July 8, 2007 I currently have a 1394 firewire card for my 003R but I record straight to my C drive. While this is considered a no-no, I've been doing it for over 18 months (previously with an mbox2) with no trouble but would like to both prevent any issues and free up the drive so I'm thinking of recording straight to an external firewire drive. My question is: is a standard firewire drive (400 Mbits/s) fast enough to capture 8 channels at once or do I need the 800 Mbits/s card and drive? I run a Dell computer with a 2.53 GHz procesor and 1 GB of RAM with Windows XP Home. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members alcohol Posted July 8, 2007 Members Share Posted July 8, 2007 I've been able to playback 32 tracks on a Glyph 400Mbit drive. I've recorded 12 tracks at once on such a drive, and I've recorded one or two tracks while playing back 30 tracks on such a drive. I only recommend that you have a fan in your drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members alphajerk Posted July 8, 2007 Members Share Posted July 8, 2007 put a secondary SATA drive in the bitch and go from there... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members TimOBrien Posted July 8, 2007 Members Share Posted July 8, 2007 I second a Glyph. I've been running a Glyph GT050 daisy-chained to my Motu828mkII for a year now with ZERO problems.Worth the few extra bucks they cost because they are DEAD SILENT (you have to look at the access light flicker to know they're on. And you can rack-mount them too (really frees up space on my desk and I know it's safe in my rack.) Glyph is also the only company to offer DATA RECOVERY services for FREE if anything goes wrong with the drive (ever price that with anyone else????) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil O'Keefe Posted July 8, 2007 Share Posted July 8, 2007 Firewire 400 is plenty fast enough. The important thing is to get a external drive enclosure with an Oxford firewire chipset. Not all firewire drives will work properly with a 002 / 003. Digidesign's compatability docs specifically call for a drive with an Oxford 911 or 912 chipset. As far as recording to the C drive, it will usually work just fine, depending on your system and the size of the session. The reason why a second, dedicated audio drive is usually a good idea is due to the fact that the program and OS are accessing that C (system) drive too, thus cutting into the bandwidth for the audio recording / playback. IOW, you'll get higher simultaneous track counts (recording / playback) with a dedicated drive than you will with just the C drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Zooey Posted July 9, 2007 Members Share Posted July 9, 2007 I've recorded 16 tracks simultaneously with a "Mercury" drive sold by macsales.com (and those are none too fancy). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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