Fastest external hard drive I could get?

4

4-Man Takedown

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What would be the specs for the fastest external harddrive I could get. I want it to be able to handle as many tracks as possible. I've heard 16mb cache, and I know it needs to be at least 7,200rpm or whatever.

Thanks, I only know a little about this stuff.
 
Probably a fiber channel card and an XServe RAID or something similar.

:D

Oh, you mean a single hard drive? 15,000 RPM drive with a serial SCSI connection. (Yikes!)

:D

Oh, you mean for a reasonable price? Probably a drive case with an Oxford 912 bridge chipset with a recent firmware update combined with a 7200 or 10,000 RPM ATA drive (parallel, not serial ATA, or else the case costs about half again more money).
 
ya, as far as i know 7200 rpm is about as fast as you can get for standard firewire/usb type external drives. you could get a 15,000 rpm SCSI drive as suggested, but like dgatwood says, they are pretty pricy. I have also heard that they are super loud. how many tracks did you want to record at once? we recorded 8-10 tracks at band practice onto a firewire drive no problem.
 
minofifa said:
ya, as far as i know 7200 rpm is about as fast as you can get for standard firewire/usb type external drives. you could get a 15,000 rpm SCSI drive as suggested, but like dgatwood says, they are pretty pricy. I have also heard that they are super loud. how many tracks did you want to record at once? we recorded 8-10 tracks at band practice onto a firewire drive no problem.
Click to expand...

You can get 10k, but it's serial ATA. If you have a SATA card in your machine with an external connector, you could slap one in a $40 external SATA case and you're done. If you have FireWire and/or USB but not SATA, there are cases for about $90 that will bridge SATA to FireWire (and maybe USB).

In either case, I'd expect 10k drives to be pretty noisy, too, though, and IIRC the 10k drives were the ones IBM was having hideous failure rates on a few years ago, so I wouldn't do it personally.... :D

BTW, I've done 30+ tracks on an Oxford 911-bridged case with a 7200 RPM drive. It's pretty decent, but if your software isn't set up to handle a high latency hard drive, you can run into some weird problems. Same would be true for external SATA. Hopefully you won't run into that, though.
 
I have a 7,200 rpm firewire drive, but it only allows for about 20 tracks or so, I would like at least 24. My internal drives get about the same, but I don't feel like swapping them out. I'd rather just get a fast external for tracking.

I'm thinking there is something besides the rpms that will allow more tracks. I thought I heard someone mention that the cache was important, but I have no idea.
 
4-Man Takedown said:
I have a 7,200 rpm firewire drive, but it only allows for about 20 tracks or so, I would like at least 24. My internal drives get about the same, but I don't feel like swapping them out. I'd rather just get a fast external for tracking.

I'm thinking there is something besides the rpms that will allow more tracks. I thought I heard someone mention that the cache was important, but I have no idea.
Click to expand...

Cache shouldn't make much difference except in decreasing the amount of time it takes your computer to initially fill its playback buffer when you start playing. The cache in any drive will always be at least enough to hold one complete track, and with audio, the data tends to be so highly contiguous that anything beyond that makes little, if any, difference.

The things that affect performance are:

1. FireWire bridge chipset. Oxford is king. Others tend to have lower throughput.
2. Properly written recording software. FireWire may have relatively low latency, but it is still seriously high when compared to a device attached to your PCI bus.

20 tracks seems unusually low to me for a FireWire drive. What software are you using for recording? What model of computer?
 
I use Tracktion 1, into a shuttle xpc that I built myself.

Maybe it's Tracktion, I'm pretty sure I was able to get more on N-track on my older computer, but I'm not positive and I like Tracktion a lot better.
 
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