Lack of Firewire ports help!

[Martallika666]

Hi guys, I've got an iMac which has only one FW 800 port on the back, and no FW 400 ports. I intend on getting a Focusrite Saffire pro 14 and connect it up using FW but I am also getting an OWC Exreme Pro AL external HDD which connects via FW or USB 2.0 too.

What do I do? For £30 less i can get the USB version of the HDD which will save me money but this will be money sacrificng speed won't it? Is there anyway I could daisy chain FW devices?

Is having the HDD via USB 2.0 really not that big a deal? Because I obviosuly want the soundcard connected through FW?

Any comments would be great,

Cheers, M.

 

[Bobbsy]

Well, the Firewire 400/800 thing isn't a problem. FW800 ports can handle FW400 devices fine, just at the maximum FW400 speed. Apple resellers should be able to sell you the necessary adaptor cable.

Regarding multiple Firewire ports, this is a bigger issue. From the Focusrite site:

Most computers will generally be equipped with one FireWire bus. You may have multiple FireWire
ports on your computer, but these are all connected to one physical chip, which controls the bus. The
FireWire chip is limited in the amount of data bandwidth it can handle, so the more FireWire devices
connected to the FireWire bus, the greater chance there is of having more data than can be dealt with.
Whether it is possible to run multiple devices on the same FireWire bus will depend on what other
FireWire devices are connected, and what they are doing. When more data is being streamed than the
FireWire chip can handle, audio dropouts and/or connection instability will be experienced. Under
these circumstances, we would recommend using multiple FireWire buses by installing a PCI/PCIe
card (desktop), or a PCMCIA/ExpressCard (laptop).

I don't use a Mac laptop but my memory is that they don't have a PCMCIA/Expresscard slot. If I'm wrong and they do, that's your solution. If not, then I'd go for the USB2 version of your new HDD. I use a USB2 drive with my laptop and a Firewire audio adaptor and it works fine up to more tracks than I ever need (16+). I suspect this is more reliable than trying to split the dedicated Firewire bandwidth.

Bob

 

[Martallika666]

Thanks Bob! That's great news, that means I will save on the HDD! Also, nly use up to about 8 tracks so it should work out fine! Thanks again, M.

 

[TimOBrien]

Mac -> drive -> interface

Firewire was DESIGNED to daisy-chain.

(Been running a Glyph drive daisy-chained to my Motu828mkII for years....)

 

[Bobbsy]

Firewire devices can be daisy-chained (though typically few devices other than hard drives have two FW ports to allow this--I've never seen a video or audio device with more than one port). However, the bandwidth is fixed at the maximum rate and, if you get into multitracking, running each track through the firewire bus at least twice halves what you can do with the bandwidth. Up to X number of tracks (number depending on sample rate and bit depth used) will work...beyond that number and there will be a crash when working with real time applications like audio.

 

[Martallika666]

Hi Tim.

I don't really plan on doing any multitracking Bob. I will mainly be recording individual instruments at a time. So could I plug the external HDD into the firewire port and then the soundcard into the external HDD using the other firewire port??? I wouldn't have to get a Firewire hub? Would that be a big hindrance to my system? Also, does that mean the drivers and/or software that comes with my soundcard will have to be installed on the external HDD?

Another thing, I have heard a lot about the OWC Elite pro Al external HDD's, I was going to get one of those imported as I'm in the UK, but I am unsure what gb to get. My system has a 1TB hdd built in with 16GB RAM, should I get a 500gb or 1tb or bigger external hdd??

Thanks, Mark.

 

[suprstar]

A 1tb hard drive is pretty cheap, and plenty sufficient.. A 1TB drive costs what, $20 more than a 500g one? I've been recording shit for 8 or so years and have about 700gb in tracks and projects. Of course if your tracks have to share drive space with your p orn collection, you better get the biggest drive you can afford Anyway 1TB should be good for several hundred thousand track-minutes if I'm doing my napkin-math correctly. I like having projects on an external drive, or at least a partition separate from the OS. Especially with xp, I end up re-installing the OS periodically, I dont have to worry about backing up my proj's then. Plus, while your OS drive is reading/writing windows swap, vsti libraries, etc, your tracks are being recorded with no interruption or competitions from other things requiring disk I/O.

 

[TimOBrien]

However, the bandwidth is fixed at the maximum rate and, if you get into multitracking, running each track through the firewire bus at least twice halves what you can do with the bandwidth.

This is true, but FW400 has the bandwidth for well over 100+ simultaneous tracks at 24/44.1or48k.
FW800 can stream double that.
Unless you're doing enormous orchestrations it wont be a problem.

 

[Bobbsy]

Sort of true (the theoretical max rarely works in real life) at 44.1/48 but lots of people these days use 88.2 or 96. This halves the total track count. Then route each track through the bus twice, this halves it again--and this takes you into a range where it can be significant. I'm also less sure about the effect of having a FW400 device on the same bus as a FW800 device--I believe this slows the whole bus down to FW400 speed.

For a limited number of tracks, I'm sure it works fine--but I'd prefer to keep things separated. You pays your money and takes your chances!

 

[Martallika666]

both devices use FW 800. I'm going to get this: OWC MEAQ7S1TB32M 1.0TB (1000GB) Mercury Elite-AL... in stock at OWC

And I have this: Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 FireWire Audio Interface | DV247

I'll try daisy chaining it for a while and using the hdd via USB and see which runs better and post my results, how's that?

 

[Bobbsy]

Frankly, with that interface and limited tracks, either route should work okay. It's only when you start pushing things that it should matter.

 

[suprstar]

Totally. I've recorded 16 tracks at a time on a 5 year old laptop with the worlds slowest 40gb 5400rpm hard drive with no problem. The same laptop mixes 24 tracks including some hard core vsti's and a ton of plugins without a glitch. Any modern computer is more than capable of doing anything the average home studio can throw at it.

 

[RadLobster]

I did some research on this subject recently and like bob is saying, you should use the firewire for the interface and usb for the hard drive, and if possible use the hard-drive only for storing your recordings to keep it organized and swift. the main point I've come across is that, like bob said, interface in the firewire port and harddrive in the usb port will potentially save you some trouble down the line.

and another thing, it may not seem too necessary at the moment to do this due to your smaller scale demoing, but I assure you that you will probably hit a wall eventually, just from yourself making progress in the scope of your recordings.

sorry if that was kind of ramble-ramble-like.

 

[suprstar]

I dont beleive that... USB uses the PC CPU to do its bussing, firewire is done in the firewire hardware. You can NOT overload a firewire 400 bus until you have 170 tracks recording simultaneously at 44.1/24. The relatively tiny bit of fw bandwidth you save is nothing compared to the amount of CPU you're gonna use pushing all that data thru USB.. Stick with the firewire for the best performance.

 

[Martallika666]

I'm going to get the OWC quad interface 1.5tb external hdd, which has FW800 and FW400 ports, connect it up to the iMac using FW800, and then connect a Focusrite Saffire pro 24 DSP using the FW400 port.

Should be a pretty sweet set up once I've got it all together!

Thanks for all your input guys, it's been invaluable!

M.