Need Advice On Esata External Drives For Audio Options

[miserlou]

Hello all, I need some advice on eSATA external drives for audio. I use Digital Performer 6 for my main DAW. I have 4 WD Firewire 800 drives that are connected to my 8-Core Mac Pro by the tower's firewire ports. I've been told that I need an eSATA PCI card and that I can connect my WD hard drives individually to the card via the eSATA connector ports that's provided on the drives...and this will give me faster results with my audio.

Does anyone have experience with external eSATA connections and what cards and drives do you recommend?

Thanks!!
Rod

[FastEddy]

Puzzled: Why "rebuild" all your drive mechanisms? You don't actually gain much (if any) in performance.

Of course, if you already have FireWire ports, you would not need to get more SATA drives at all. ... FW800 is as fast or faster anyway, for streaming audio or video. Plus cross compatibility with other Apple systems ... and more compatibility with pro-audio, generally (especially useful in a pro-audio studio). There are plenty of "combo" port drives too .., find one with both SATA and FireWire ports (or USB, or all three types). Here is but one: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11156 ... That way you can save the cost of the PCI / PCexpress card(s), etc., for something useful ...

(Mercenary Announcement: http://firewirestuff.com is one of my web sites ... but we don't carry hard drives anymore ... But I like La Cie drives and equipment, generally.)

This post has been edited by FastEddy: Sun 1 Mar 2009, 16:46

[Bluemover9999]

Hi There

have you seen this

http://www.newertech.com/products/esata_cable.php

It uses two redundant ports on the MacPro motherboard and creates two additional esata ports on your MacPro.
Then you can take you pick of esata RAID options...do a google search for the best option.