Hi, I'm running Cubase SX3 on a G4 Powerbook. The VST plugins are in the powerbook and the project folders (songs) are on a Maxtor external hard drive with FireWire 400. Every is fine till the project grows and starts to stutter or worse. I'm habituating holding the fx plugins to a minimum and the other standard CPU economizing procedures.
My question is twofold: 1- Does it make more sense to move the active projects into the powerbook for a session and only use the external HD for storage? and 2- Would a firewire 800 disk make a significant difference in stutter free/smooth data transfer? If yes to the second question, is it also sensible to store the larger VST libraries on a firewire 800 disk? The question boils down to- my understanding is that an internal (ATA?) drive is faster than and external disk (correct?) and if so,does firewire 800 significantly close the gap? Thank you in advance for any help in this regard, Bonzulu

a standard internal powerbook drive is 4200rpm
Most but not all external drives are or should be 7200RPM that makes a huge difference.
I am not sure how you can setup cubase SX3 but generally people run there audio files on the external drive to get the extra speed.
The faster the internal drive the better !
Firewire 800 is definitley faster than 400 and both are way quicker then USB 2.0.
an external firewire drive running at 7200rpm will kick an intenral drive spinning at 4200RPM.. no questions about it!

I'm running cubase 2.2 in a powerbook G4 1g with 1g of ram and a lacie d2 external drive thru a m-audio 410 and I have tried different places for my project files, in and out the Pb, 800 or 400, but I've come to the conclusion that cubase is a hungry beast and needs a bigger machine to run properly, just 3 plugs at a time and the project becomes slow and cliks, I must say that the vsts I used are heavy (Kontact,Arturia's moog, etc) so, for my experience, it is just cubase that needs big cpu power to run smoothly, I've put on hold the upgrade to version 3 for now because of it.

firewire 800 port, 7200 rpm, 8mb buffer, >500 gb drive.

USB2 and FW 400 are in the same league spec wise, but the way the protocol of USB is made makes it a bad contendant against FW. Bandwith is slightly bigger in ISB 2 but 400 wins for streaming files with mandatory timing.

FW 400 will give you about 27-28 MB/s in reality, about 50 in FW 800 which the most you can squizz out of ATA drives. Best would be FW to SATA enclosures, but it's rare and $$$.

Have a good fast internal drive for system, VM and apps, a a big bad FW 400 or better 800 for all the Audio.

This post has been edited by lepetitmartien: Tue 9 Nov 2004, 06:54

What could you get out of a FW to SATA enclosure, I've heard another person on here mention he used this and it worked stellar. Any suggestions? Is it an adapter for an internal harddrive with SCSI to a FW port. What kind of speed can you get out of it?

What about higher-speed hardrives (I've heard of 12000+)

This post has been edited by iShawn: Fri 12 Nov 2004, 17:57

Right now I'm still with FW800/400/USB2 and FW400/USB2 enclosure with regular IDE drives in (Maxtor and IBM respectively).

FW800 is supposed to deliver about 70 MB/s, note that right now (got to make the test again, I did only 27-28 MB on FW800 on my G5, but it seems G5 FW800 is buggy (in a slow way) i'll update on this once I've come across some evidence or better results.

i've still to come across FW/SATA enclosure but it should be just fine I don't know the theoretical data rates of SATA though (anyone?). Right now, IDE drives in FW400 or 800 are fast enough for a very comfortable number of tracks,

FW to SCSI adapters are made for special use (connecting peculiar peripherals like scanners for example) they are SCSI 1-2 device usually (as far as I know) so they are certainly not made for heavy data rate, forget them.

Very fast RPM drives are made but we are talking upon drives with very high rate demands (think video, motion picture soundtrack recording...) as soon as you enter the domain of FAST drive solution, there's plenty of possibilities beforehand like RAID 0, 10 (0 + 1) SCSI solution (RAID also), fiber channel, NAT etc. For common use in Audio, some RAID in IDE or SATA is more than enough, and expensive enough too we're talking of dozens and dozens of stereo tracks at the same time without glitch.

Normal Parallel ATA-100 (EIDE) drives have a theoretical 100 MB/s at the buss (except for Maxtor's ATA-133 at, well, 133 MB/s). Serial ATA (SATA) is a theoretical 150 MB/s. Not a big difference.

In this case, the limiting factors are the drive's mechanical latency and rotational speed, the performance of the case's bridge chipset (FW to ATA or FW to SATA), the speed of the Firewire interface on the computer, and the loading of the Firewire buss with other data. Even putting a SATA card in a PCI slot limits it to PCI's 133 MB/s bandwidth shared with all the other PCI devices.

Each of these factors in turn adds to slowdown on the data bandwidth. This is why companies are trying to bring out external SATA solutions where the SATA ribbon cable is brought out to the external drive case, so that most of these bottlenecks can be bypassed. So far however, external SATA looks a bit lashed together and non-rugged. Also not a help for Powerbook owners.

Suffice to say that any performance benefit of 100 vs 150 MB/s in the drive interface will be well below the noise floor of the other limitations to bandwidth in an external Firewire drive.

If you have a Firewire 400 audio interface on a G5, definitely put your external hard drive on Firewire 800, just to keep them on separate busses. Same theory if your have two Firewire drives - split them up on separate busses. Some of the high end PowerMacs have 2 separate FW400 busses as opposed to 2 ports on a single buss - can' t remember which at the moment.

1Shawn: the fastest IDE and SATA drives are 7,200 RPM except for the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor series (small fast, hot, expensive, noisy). Ultra-SCSI drives can come in 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM flavours, but they have no part in this Firewire discussion.

A high speed SCSI system would need a dedicated interface card and/or an expensive external RAID setup. If you are Pixar, you live there. Mere mortals don't.

Thanks
Trevor
www.canadaram.com

A little update, I retried to measure the speed of transfer from my FW800 HD, I measured 38 MB/s this time. Note it is not a battery test measure, just copy thru finder.

The FW400 ports of the G5 are one real port only.