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

[CanadaRAM]

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