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

[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