Firewire 800 Options

[bonzulu]

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

[lepetitmartien]

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