Hi guys!
I need to buy an external hard drive to use with Protools and my powerbook 17" 1.5 GHz.
I would like to know what do you think about the differences between a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 320GB with a Firewire 800 - Oxford 912-8Mb and a
Maxtor OneTouch™ II - 300GB with a Firewire 400 - Oxford 911-16 Mb.

Everytime a read a review it's always about people that use the hd for pro video/photo, I would like to know something about the ProAudio needs.
Thanks!

For both audio and video, you'll want the fastest data transfer speed.

Firewire 400 is the equivalent of USB 2.0, which will get the job done, but is much slower in comparison to Firewire 800. And if you're still undecided, why not get a LaCie d2 Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10025

Firewire 800 / 7200 rpm / 8 0r 16MB Buffer is the way to go.

As to Lacie vs. Maxtor, ..That's really a personal choice. Western Digital has some pretty nice external drives, as well. In fact, I'm thinking of getting......

http://microcenter.com/single_product_resu...duct_id=0169867

Good luck to ya

Thanks for the answer!
So you suggest the triple interface one instead of the big disk extreme 320?
Do you think there is a difference between the 2 models that is not just the opportunity of having the USB 2?
Thanks again!

If you feel you'd need to have the 3 options(USB 2.0, Firewire 400 & 800), then by all means get the triple face.

As to the 320GB, you might find this article helpful...

http://www.barefeats.com/fire45.html

I noticed you posted at the Digidesign User Conference Forums as well.

Good luck

Uh… USB2 is just on paper a little better than FW400. In reality a little less efficient.
FW 800 is twice as fast.

BTW FW is better at handling data streaming.

Big Disk are RAID 0 so you double speed (it uses 2 drives in stripping). The Maxtor is a single disk so with normal access time.

Now a single drive gives in FW 800 about 40-50 MB per second which is enough for a lot of tracks… If you use a double disk drive your risk of MTBF rise accordingly.

Wich interface are you going to use?

I liked your answer, pretty clear and it's what I was looking for.
Alright, let's say that I have to use it with a 17" Powerbook 1.5 GHz and Protools.
But now I'm more confused...eh ehe eh .
Alright, if I get a double disk I'll have 60MB instead of 40 but the risk of MTBF, and if I have a single disk I get the 40 MB/sec.

What about this lacie: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10489


http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10489

Now I'm more confused...

Yes, it can all be so confusing.

One definite thing you may have gathered here is that FW800 is most definitely the way to go ..and that is the answer to your original ?.

Also, keep in mind that bigger is not always better. If you're not going to be encountering any massive audio file storage, you might consider buying a 2-250GB Drive. You can always stack/add more as you need them.

Now, with that said, either of the Models mentioned will do you just fine.

Good luck

Yeah Nels, I posted the same question on the Digidesign forum too...
I was cecking this page http://www.barefeats.com/fire45.html
but I can't understand something: what does Dual 2 channel and Dual 1 channel mean?
Thanks for the previous answer!

don't forget that you won't get any more tracks onto a fw800 drive than a fw400...it's the spin speed that counts, more tracks onto a 10,000 rpm than a 7200 rpm...you can strap at least 3 drives on a fw400 bus and max them all out track count wise before the bus gets too full...

Two Channel vs One channel refers to Firewire ports and whether the machine has a separate Firewire interface chip for each port, or whether the 2 ports are simply attached to a single interface chip.

Think of a garden hose. If you take one hose and put a Y-splitter on the nozzle end, you have two "ports" but only one "channel" -- the same amount of water will come out, just 1/2 on each nozzle.

Now think of two different hoses connected to different taps, each one can deliver the full volume to its output (Port) This is two channel, much wetter (er.. faster).

This is also the reason why Firewire audio interfaces perform less well when you daisy-chain a hard drive off them; the drive data is contending with the audio data in the same hose (channel).

Setting up two-channel Firewire on most Macs requires installing a PCI Firewire card, or a PCMCIA Firewire interface on a Powerbook.

G5's have two channels, one for FW400 and one for FW800, so put the audio interface on the FW400 and the hard drive on the FW800. Two FW800 channels still requires a card.

A couple of the high end G4 towers had two FW400 channels, most didn't.

Barefeats found that when you use two channel Firewire the performance of a dual-drive setup is much better, simply because all the data is not trying to push through a single channel. Their reference to "D2 Dual 1 Channel" refers to the drive they were testing; the "LaCie D2 Dual" drive which has 2 drives in one case. They tested this drive with both 1-channel and 2-channel connections.

Ourmanflinty: Barefeats showed that the same Parallel IDE 7200 RPM Hitachi drive had significantly better throughput on Firewire 800 - about 50% better in fact - so I don't believe that Firewire 400 is higher in real-world throughput than the drive itself. http://www.barefeats.com/fire35.html

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com[/B]

Trevor,

Just had to commend you on your concise explanation/description. Doesn't get much better than that.

Great Post!

Happy Holidays to all!

well, do the maths. real world sustained 32meg / second equates to around 180 stereo 16 bit 44.1 tracks!!! so 24 bit should be around 120!! how many tracks will your drive record?? did i get this wrong??



did bearfeats say he was getting 32Mbytes/s to a 7200 drive? did he mean bits or bytes? that can't be right, my maths is wrong surely...someone else work it out please..

umm, one big file as in the barefeats tests shown doesn't completely convince me that it's good for audio, obviously the drive can take a lot of data, the manufacturer states 56 to 29 Mbytes/sec sustained which will use up a fw400 bus and more! 50MB/sec theoretical and 32 or above in the real world. I don't usually copy many big single files over, any paparazzi or video editors on here?
That's a 3 platter 6 head drive, if you went for the 60GB option you're down to 1 platter 2 heads, read the datasheet, and one third of the data rates he saw in his test. Now how many can you get on a fw400 bus?

If you talk about track count then you are recording or playing back lots of seperate files to a drive, with edits perhaps and other data in the bitstream, faster spinning more platters and more heads make a difference. I expect that drive may achieve 60+ 44.1 16 bit tracks but I'd like to see some track count based firewire comparison tests wouldn't you??

Hmmm I appreciate this thred... I've having some challenges right now...

I have a PowerBook G4/1.33Ghz a Lacie FW800 Drive, DP 4.5 and the MOTU 828 MKII (FW400) interface. Things are bogging down pretty quickly.. I wondered if the PowerBook G4's FW400 and FW800 ports used different channels or do I need to get a PCMCIA card to have another channel?

Thanks!
-Vincent

You need to find out where the problem is, try going to the internal drive instead first, you should get a decent amount of tracks to that. How much ram do you have? It can contribute.

Just a thought, but I'd heard that DP OSX wasn't the fastest / best written program on the block so can you try a different program?

I get better response than from the internal drive. I've got a Gig of Ram. DP's the only one that I want to use, I'm just looking to optimize it as much as possible : )

Thanks,
Vincent

bogs down pretty quick, any details? how many tracks etc what bit rates, samples streaming from te drive or in memory etc etc