Recording to firewire drives

[Micter]

Anyone doing this with any ammount of sucess?

[xcrazymx]

yes... i would recommend it.

make sure you get a decent firewire drive and not some cheap, junky one.

[Ironklad Audio]

hell yea dude, firewire is the only way to go for PC recording IMHO

[littledog]

When I do remote recording with my Digi 002R, it's my only option, since it is strongly discouraged to use the system drive in the laptop to record on. I record sixteen simultaneous tracks all the time and have never had a glitch or a crash.

Just make sure the drive is reasonably fast.

[studiomaster]

Firewire drives would be super cool for portability. an extra one would be helpful for backup reasons.

[Micter]

I bought a drive for back up and for the ability to take the sessions to another studio with ease. I started thinking why not record directly to the drive? I started reading the specs and it's 7200 RPM and 100 MB/s transfer rate. 100 megs per second isn't as fast as my internal drives but when will I need to do more than that? I don't do drums here so it's usually 2 to 4 tracks at a time. Anyway, thanks for the responses.

Micter

[sixways]

I just got a 7200rpm 250gig Lacie from www.bhphotovideo.com for $150 shipped. Nice little unit.

6

[TimOBrien]

Been using a Glyph GT050 80Gb firewire drive for a year now with my laptop and MOTU828mkII.

Very fast and dead silent. Rack mounted, too. Worth every penny I paid for it....

[tarnationsauce2]

I use a firewire drive for backups.
It is way, way slower than my SATA II RAID hard drives that I use for tracking and mixing.

[Micter]

Originally Posted by tarnationsauce2

I use a firewire drive for backups.
It is way, way slower than my SATA II RAID hard drives that I use for tracking and mixing.

Ya I'm runnin' ATA 133 drives and the firewire drive is 100 MG/s close enough but a little slower. If I were trying to track a lot of instrument simultaneously it might be a problem. I'm looking to get a new computer here in a month or so. Might be going to Mac, I'm not sure yet.

[Ironklad Audio]

i've recorded 12 tracks simultaneously @ 24/96 thru firewire, onto my not-all-that-impressively fast HD with no problems, so...umm...yea

[rockabilly1955]

are all 12 tracks that were recorded simultaneously output to 12 individual tracks on your audio software?? to be able to edit each track seperately?

[littledog]

Originally Posted by rockabilly1955

are all 12 tracks that were recorded simultaneously output to 12 individual tracks on your audio software?? to be able to edit each track seperately?

Of course. What else could recording 12 tracks simultaneously mean?

As I said earlier, I record 16 tracks simultaneously to a firewire drive all the time. Eight through the Digi 002R preamps, and eight more through the lightpipe input from an external 8 channel preamp. I've never had a problem. You just want to make sure both units are slaved to the same clock - although that has absolutely nothing to do with the firewire drive.

[rockabilly1955]

what else does 12 simultaneous inputs mean?? It means you can record from a mixer with 16, 18, 20, however many inputs "simultaneously" the mixer has and the output is still a stereo track with all instruments/inputs summed up to that track, so you wouldnt be able to edit each input individually. I need something that can record multiple inputs simultaneously but output each instument to an individual track as well so i can edit each one individually (example... 8 instruments= 8 individual tracks on the audio software, not just one stereo track). Damn......sorry it went a bit off topic

[littledog]

Originally Posted by rockabilly1955

what else does 12 simultaneous inputs mean?? It means you can record from a mixer with 16, 18, 20, however many inputs "simultaneously" the mixer has and the output is still a stereo track with all instruments/inputs summed up to that track, so you wouldnt be able to edit each input individually. I need something that can record multiple inputs simultaneously but output each instument to an individual track as well so i can edit each one individually (example... 8 instruments= 8 individual tracks on the audio software, not just one stereo track). Damn......sorry it went a bit off topic

It all comes down to semantics, but what you are describing is commonly known as recording "live to two track". It stems from the days where multiple mic'ed sources were mixed on a board and recorded to a two-track tape deck. That is, obviously, completely different than multitrack recording. I thought it was made abundantly clear that we are NOT talking about "live to two track" when discussing the capability of firewire drives to do multitrack recording. If you were premixing the tracks on a mixer, and just sending the firewire drive a stereo track, than theoretically you could "record" 1000+ tracks simultaneously to firewire drive, assuming you could find a mixer that big, using your definition of "simultaneous recording".

But just in case it wasn't clear before, I hope it has been clarified.

[littledog]

Originally Posted by rockabilly1955

are all 12 tracks that were recorded simultaneously output to 12 individual tracks on your audio software?? to be able to edit each track seperately?

So let me rephrase my original answer:

yes

[rockabilly1955]

i now want a Firepod

[ellery]

I use Lacie firewire 400 drives to track and Mix from. No performance issues so far. (recorded 24 tracks at 96k).

A small tech note. Just because a drive has an interface speed of 100MB/s does not mean it can move data that fast. Most of the drives i have tested range from 34MB/s to 60MB/s i have yet to see a drive that transfers at bus speed.