logic problems, disk too slow Options

[gemmar]

Hi,

have a problem concerning disk speed using logic audio 4.7 Platinum. With audio track number 10-15, depending on particular Track, my powerbook (titanium 400) comes up with disk too slow error. Can someone explain this to me, i thought, running 12 little audio tracks of 2 to 8 bars length shouldn't result in any problems (o.k., there are some compressors, reverbs and delays running in parallel, but this shouldn't matter to the harddrive, or what?), anyhow, why is such a small amount of data not kept in the RAM anyway? I just have 256 MB, would it help to put in more to improve the situation, or do i have to play around with some parameters inside Logic, which?

any help appreciated

gma

[Synthetic]

You can never have too much RAM. 1gb might be more than you really need but it also might come in really handy if you like to run lots of apps at once. RAM is at the cheapest cost I have ever seen so if you can afford it... I suggest getting all you can. I am using 320mb on my G3 350mhz and rarely run out of memory and I do lots of graphic work too. I am considering adding another 256mb sometime though.

The maxtor drive may work well enough. Is that a firewire drive or USB? The only concern would be that a USB external drive might not have the transfer rate to keep up with lots of audio tracks. USB is ok for mice and printers but I would never buy a USB drive or CD-ROM etc. Not that they don't work but not fast enough for my taste. When looking at drives... it is confusing when determining the speed. I look for 3 things. 1) RPMs (10,000 best or A/V but 7200 will work well) 2) Tranfer rate (I think anything over 11mb/sec is good) 3) Seek time (less than 9 seconds I think is good). Bigger drives are nice but you must also consider how long the seek time is because some large drives have very long seek times which makes computer slow in finding data on drive. Transfer time is usually related to the connection such as SCSI, USB, Firewire etc. RPMs is how fast that little wheel spins holding all of your data.

You should be able to get more than 20 tracks running in Logic with no problem with an external drive. Hope it works well for you.