Separate Audio drive for Imac G5 2.0GHz?

nkay

New member
I just got an Imac G5 2.0Ghz system (with 20" monitor woo hoo)

I used to work with ProTools on my windows laptop, I used a USB2.0 external drive for an audio drive which seemed to work fine, however, I was using an Mbox with only up to two inputs, and my full projects have only been around 15 tracks at the very most.

With the new Imac, it has an internal SATA 7200 drive. My USB ports will be filled with the keyboard/mouse, Mbox, external audio drive, and even a midi keyboard for soft synth.

Would it be better to use the internal drive for both system and audio? I know its not recommended, but I figured with the smallish projects I would be using, the Mac's internal drive might work a lot better than the USB2.0 external drive fighting with all the those other devices on the USB bus.


I want to avoid buying another external hard drive, if possible, but do you think I have to bite the bullet and get a external Firewire drive?
 
a firewire drive is my goal this fall/winter for my iMac it seems like a better idea to me as .wav files are HUGE so i would say that its a good idea but right now i am not able to do so and run on the 80gb drive that is half full and its starting to give me trouble :(
 
nkay said:
With the new Imac, it has an internal SATA 7200 drive. My USB ports will be filled with the keyboard/mouse, Mbox, external audio drive, and even a midi keyboard for soft synth.

Would it be better to use the internal drive for both system and audio? I know its not recommended, but I figured with the smallish projects I would be using, the Mac's internal drive might work a lot better than the USB2.0 external drive fighting with all the those other devices on the USB bus.

A 7200 SATA internal hard drive will outperform any external drive you can attach to that machine (except a 10k RPM SATA with a SATA<-->FireWire case, but I doubt you're looking for something in that price range...:D). The internal drive should work fine for audio as long as your system isn't using the drive heavily for other things at the same time.

Make sure you have enough RAM that your system never ends up paging to disk. If you're running 10.4, you should probably disable Spotlight indexing for the folder where you're doing audio work (but you'd want to do that even on a separate drive). That's about it.

This is the point where I mention that a 7200 RPM drive will typically give sustained throughput of 30-45 MB/second reading, and not too much less than that writing. That's 80-120 concurrent tracks at 96kHz, 32 bits per sample. At a more sane 24-bit 44.1kHz, that's 238-357 simultaneous tracks.

With modern drives, drive performance is almost never the bottleneck. Problems attributed to drive performance are generally caused by poorly written software, poorly written file system design (e.g. the DOS FAT filesystem), or not having enough RAM to avoid constant seeking due to paging.

Don't get me wrong. There are still good reasons to use a separate drive. It certainly makes backups easier---simply copy everything periodically to your system drive as a backup. It also makes it easier to wipe your OS and reinstall if something goes terribly wrong.... But if your purpose for adding a second drive is performance, just make sure you have enough RAM and you use decent audio software, and you should be fine with the internal drive. :D
 
Thanks, that's what I needed to know from a technical perspective.

I guess I'll just try using the internal drive, and if things start getting glitchy... save up for a Firewire external drive.
 
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