So, a second hard drive would be better than a Firewire drive?

Bassman Brad

New member
In my earlier post, I explained that I'm in the process of trying to assemble a PC-based home recording setup. I ordered the Presonus Firepod from Musician's Friend, but was one day too late to get the free firewire drive that they were throwing in for a period of time. (However, I will still get the AT2020 mic.) I had assumed that I would just have to go out and buy a firewire drive myself. However, I've been told that installing a second hard drive in my computer would be a better option. Is this correct? I thought the Firewire was supposed to be extremely fast, and designed specifically for streaming media.

My PC is an off the shelf HP with 1.5 gig Pentium 4 and 700+ meg of ram. However, I'm not sure that the HPs even have enough physical space in the case for a second hard drive. So, I would presumably have to buy a new case, the new hard drive, and then have my computer whiz nephew to install everything in the new case. (Might as well use the opportunity to install a quieter fan, too, while I'm at it.) So, this is looking like a fairly expensive and complicated endeavor. Wouldn't a firewire drive be a lot simpler?

Also, I understand that the firewire spec allows for daisy chaining of devices. I only have one firewire port on the machine. Does this make a difference in deciding if I should go with a second hard drive or an outboard firewire drive? If I do need a firewire drive, are there particular specs that I should pay attention too? I understand that any hard drive will work for audio, as long as it's rated at 7200 rpm. Is this correct?

Thanks,
Brad
 
an internal IDE/ATA drive is definitely faster than firewire or even USB.
Most firewire drives are the 1394a versions which give you a througput of 400Mbps. Compare this to an ATA-100 that gives 100MBps (notice the difference between bits and bytes). This is about twice the transfer rate as firewire. And even faster...you have SATA drives.

however, the good thing about firewire is that the drives are portable....and you don't have to have a motherboard with another IDE input on it. It sounds like you might be a bit confused on the whole computer thing, so it might even just be easier to get a firewire drive and just plug it in. However, read up on what the connections look like in your computer to see if you even have another port to plug in an IDE drive. But you should be totally fine in getting a firewire drive. Tons of engineers use them

And yes, you can daisy chain out of other firewire gear. Most firewire hardware will have two ports on it for this purpose.
 
Wow that was fast!

Thanks for the info, Bennychico. Yeah. Computers in general are a big pain in the @$$, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, I've been having trouble getting my CD burning software (Pyro) to work all day. My recording experience is on analog tape, and that was a LOOOONG time ago. Eventually, I want to switch to using dedicated HD recorders with a mixer. This would be a MUCH more confortable way for me to work. But, for now, I want to learn the basics of how to record on a DAW, and also get familiar with MIDI, since I plan to program my drum parts, rather than record them. Cubase SE looks like it'll be a good place to start for this.

Thanks again for the help. :)

Brad
 
By the way, will one Firewire drive work about as well as any other? Are there certain ones that people here have had good (or bad) experiences with?

Brad
 
just like anything, there are good products and cheap products out there. i've had good experience with Maxtor and EZQuest. And then Western Digital and Seagate are both two big companies too.
 
Bassman Brad said:
I've been having trouble getting my CD burning software (Pyro) to work all day.

Brad

You may just try moving your files to be written into your burner drive, if you are using XP it will ask you if you would like to burn them to disk, then you can delete your bulky CD burner software and allow the wonders of Microsoft help you.

I can find a tutorial on it if you need.

Here is a simple overview

Music to be written to disk take those files have them somewhere handy, I like making a dump file on my desktop, name it music limbo. then goto my computer and find your burner drive It should be E: open that by double clicking or right click>open.

Once that is open you can highlight all your songs ( files ) to be written and drag them from Music Limbo to your burner drive folder (E:) then you will see a popup bubble on the bottom right of your toolbar that says and i quote " you have files waiting to be burnt to disk" check out that drive E: folder now, on the left hand side it says burn files to disk, click that and your job is done, I never really understood burner software to begin with, that is unless you have some outragous program that burns in some special way, but i have yet to see those.

GL
 
And i would stick to Western Digital for external drives, and avoid the ones with neon lights in them, they create a small buzz in your monitors.
 
Thanks for the pointers, guys. :) There doesn't seem to be a huge price difference between the different drives, so I'll focus on the brands you've mentioned.

And, WOW, bonus points to dbphones for help with the help on the CD burning problem. I wasn't expecting that! :) :) :)

The deal is that Pyro lets me do crossfades, add silence between tracks, when needed, and adjust volume levels and such. I can use other programs, such as the Real player, to just burn the tracks to disc. I've also already spent a few hours setting up the project the way I want with all the aforementioned goodies added.

The problem is that, all of a sudden, Pyro is giving me a message that it no longer recognizes that I even HAVE a CD burner installed. It recognized the same drive when it ripped the songs OFF of the CDs, and I've used it many times in the past without a problem. Apparently, there is some other program that is now hogging the access to the drive. I've tried uninstalling various media players, changing the defaults for the media players, etc... After 1 1/2 days of f***ing around with this, I'm STILL getting the same message. It's totally exasperating! Grrrrr! I've had HP's CD Now program stop working for a few days before. That program will let me copy an entire CD very quickly, but won't let me put together a CD with the same sophistication as Pyro. Now, THAT program is working, but Pyro is not. Hmmph. Go figure!

I may just wait a few days and see if Pyro starts working again. Otherwise, I'll just burn them to disc another way. However, that means that I won't be able to use crossfades and I'll probably have to edit the volume level of the files individually (in Pyro), to get them to come out evenly.

Anyway, thanks for the advice, guys. I really appreciate all the help!
Brad
 
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