External Firewire 800 Hard Drive Enclosure, options and questions. Options

[SadPandas]

Hello forum,

I have searched through the forum and found some great threads regarding fire wire hard drives but still had a couple more questions. I am doing a project with a friend and he gave me his master recordings on an 80 gig internal maxtor hard drive. I was going to purchase a firewire drive anyway for my audio recording projects since it would be faster than using the 100 gig 5400 enternal hard drive on my power book and was hoping i could use it to back up my powerbook as well. My friends drive gave me the idea of buying an enclosure and using that to get the seperated tracks off of his drive and onto my desktop. From there i was thinking of hot swapping his drive with one of my own and transfering those same tracks onto the newly installed hard drive and working from there. i know this is a gigantic post so thank you for hanging in there with me. Now, the questions: is it possible to use my external firewire drive for working with audio and backing up my powerbook too? Would the speed from the internal hardrive in my powerbook and my external drive be that great of a difference? Can anyone give any suggestions for both enclosure and hard drive? All of my 'rad' gear and software can be found below in my signature. Sorry for the longest post in the history of the interweb and thanks in advance for your time and help.

pandas

This post has been edited by SadPandas: Thu 9 Jun 2005, 10:21

[lepetitmartien]

Don't bother about the length of the post, there's way way way longer records

Of course you can use a FW hard drive.
Just choose a good enclosure. The ICE (ICEcube) ones are great (got 5 of them) yet there are other great too (don't remember the name on the spot).

[Narayan]

Hi,
As stated earlier, I am very new to this Mac business. I have got a powerbook G4 1.67Gh 100 GB HDD and 1.5 Gig RAM. I used to have a USB hard drive (IBM travelstar) which I used (still use) with my Fujitsu (C series) note book. But when I plug this into my powerbook, it does not even recognise this drive. The LED in the USB drive lits up though. Do I have to down load some dirvers for this?. Will only powered fire wire external drives work with Macs! I have OS 10.3.9 with the powerbook. Please help.
Narayanan

[SadPandas]

How about you start your own thread regarding your usb drive that you are having problems with instead of hijacking this one? When you say "as i stated earlier" it makes me think you already have a thread you have started somewhere else so maybe you might want to 'bump' that thread so you can get others to look at it that might have missed it the first time around. Good luck.

pandas

[ourmanflinty]

As far as drives go, most current drives will give you plenty tracks but as a general rule, the more heads the better, also a large cache helps. Certainly a 7200 rpm upwards will work nicely but how many tracks will you be playing back from this at a time?

Look at these drive docks etc..very cool..

wiebetech

No problem keeping different 'media' on the same drive but there's always the 'all your eggs in one basket' scenario...

[SadPandas]

Would 40 audio tracks be asking too much? I was going to daisy chain the firewire 800 drive from my presonus firebox. I wonder if i can EVEN use 800 or will the firebox only daisy chain the 400 port. Hold on, im reading the Presonus Firebox review and specs and it says ieee 1394 speed is 400mbps and all this time i thought it was 800mbps because i was using a 6 pin fire wire cable from my firebox to my pbook. sigh* I think i am confuse now...


not proofread...

This post has been edited by SadPandas: Sun 19 Jun 2005, 04:33

[ourmanflinty]

40 tracks at 16bit? or 24 bit? Probably 24. What sample rate, 44.1, 48.0, 88.2, 96? Here comes the science..24 bit means half as much data again or 16 bit uses 2/3 the drive space and bandwidth of 24 bit. 88.2 uses twice as much as 44.1 . So 40 tracks of 44.1 16 bit, not too tough these days, 40 tracks of 88.2 24 bit is like 120 tracks 0f 16 / 44.1 You better go for a fast ATA drive with lots of heads, lots of platters and a big cache, and run it fw800 for maximum performance. You can usually download a spec sheet for drives off of the manufacturers website, in there you will find the detais of the whole range, capacity, platters, head count, cache size, rpm.
If you 'ang a 4 on the 8 bus then all 8 devices will run at 4, 'alf what they might otherwise.

My friends drive gave me the idea of buying an enclosure and using that to get the seperated tracks off of his drive and onto my desktop

do you mean your desktop on the laptop or a do you have a desktop and a laptop??

You can always spread the load over multiple drives like your internal, fw, scsi to get the trackcount you need as long as your DAW is ok with it.
Ummm, how about using your PCMCIA slot. There are loads of cards out there, why not give yourself another FW bus or a fast SCSI on the card slot...Beautiful, two or three busses!

This post has been edited by ourmanflinty: Sun 19 Jun 2005, 14:08

[ourmanflinty]

Quick search on google..cable universe

Under £40 for a fw800 OSX and Wintel compatible cardbus adapter!!
Just check with Prsonus customer support if they support this configuration, they may have already looked into it and have specific drivers or hardware to recommend...

Firewire800 (1394B) CardBus / CBF3100

The Firewire 800 implementation of the IEEE 1394B standard supports transfer speed of up to 800Mbps.
Firewire 800 products are backward compatible with IEEE 1394A devices (this will run at 400) 
This high-speed serial I/O technology is particularly great for use with multimedia periherals such as digital camcorders and external enclosures.

Features:
•  1 x External IEEE P1394B (9-pin) ports
•  1 x External IEEE 1394A (6pin) port
•  1 x External IEEE 1394A (4pin) port
•  DC Input Jack (Switching PSU is an option accessory) 

I would get the psu to save stressing the Mac trying to power your external drives and extra card...

System Requirements:
•  Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP, and Mac OS 10.x or later

This post has been edited by ourmanflinty: Sun 19 Jun 2005, 14:14