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General discussion

FireWire daisy chain

Oct 3, 2005 11:29PM PDT

I'm not too familiar with the peculiarities of the FireWire interface, so I'm hoping for a little enlightenment. My band is looking into getting a nifty FireWire interface, however each of the two Apple notebooks that we could use seem to have hard drives that are a bit too slow. So it occurred to me that if we wanted to do this with a notebook, we would need an external hard drive. Now, I would be open to suggestions on either USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 hard drives, but my question is, if we get a FireWire one, would we be able to daisy chain the recording interface and the hard drive together, and get them to work with the system? Let's assume that the interface is a PreSonus FIREPOD 10, and the operating system is Mac OS 10.4.2, in case that would change anyone's bearings on the issue. Also, would any of the USB hard drives out there be adequate for a home recording studio (fast enough, large enough)? Any of the hard drives suggested would have to spin at least 7200rpm.

Discussion is locked

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Firewire questions
Oct 3, 2005 11:55PM PDT

Firewire is the way to go with your project. Although the theoretical speed of USB 2.0 is faster than Firewire 400, it has so much overhead and is so processor intensive, that is seldom achieves that speed. Firewire, on the other hand, is capable of sustained transfer rates at close to its limit.
Besides that, Firewire works better on a Mac. Had you asked the same question about a PC, I would have mentioned FIrewire and pointed you toward USB 2.0. For some reason, it is better on a PC. That said:
You should be able to daisy chain the FirePod and the Hard Drive together without a problem. You may want to consider a Firewire Hub (Powered) to give yourself a little more flexibility. Instead of purchasing a ready built Firewire Hard Drive, consider purchasing a Firewire enclosure, one capable of exceeding 127GB, and purchase an IDE drive for it. IDE drives come with huge capacities, 400Gb are off the shelf items, and are relatively cheap. 400Gb@7200 = $400 this morning at BestBuy. You can almost certainly get them for less than that. Installing the drive inside the enclosure is a no brainer.
Hope this helps. Will you be using Garage Band?

P

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About speed.
Oct 4, 2005 12:14AM PDT

My experience is that this is not the road to faster disk speeds. (USB or Firewire)

Here's why. Even the slowest hard disk today bursts data at some 100 megabytes per second. That's 800 megabits per second and Firewire is 1/2 that for most systems.

Now if you can find that 800 Firewire the bottleneck is almost neglible.

-> With better hard disks for the notebooks costing not much more or same as your firewire setup, why not upgrade where it counts?

Bob

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Thanks!
Oct 4, 2005 4:45AM PDT

First of all, thanks for all the great advice! I went to CompUSA today to look at external hard drives (and to see if Black and White 2 was in yet :-P), and I noticed the enclosures instantly. I have a 160 GB hard drive in my computer I mainly use as storage, and my main system drive is much bigger, so I've decided to use the 160 in an enclosure and save about 50-150 dollars! Also, sometimes I might use Garageband if I don't have too much to do, but I also have Logic Express 7, which was mainly causing the disk problems. I figure if we wanted to record any sort of live audio at all, it would benefit to try and get a storage solution that was faster than the 4200 RPM drive in my iBook right now. Not only will it provide a vast, fast storage solution for my Logic Express/Garageband projects, but it will also lighten the power load on my PC a bit, hehe.

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OK,
Oct 4, 2005 4:52AM PDT

Take note of Bob's post also.
What flavor iBook are you running?

P

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New :-)
Oct 4, 2005 6:56AM PDT

Just picked up one of the mid-2005 ones in August, 14" model. I really like it--ever since one of my friend got a Powerbook about 2 years ago, I had slowly been warming up to them (thank OS X for that, really, and the new design of the iMac). I finally decided to spring for one, and I have been very satisfied with it for my music production and whatnot.

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(NT) (NT) Enjoy and Good Luck.
Oct 4, 2005 9:18AM PDT