Record to internal or external drive?

A

AndrewClaycomb

New member
I'm setting up a home studio with my Toshiba Laptop and a Firepod.
It's processor is a 1.5 Ghz Centrino M and it has been maxed out at 2 gigs of RAM.

The hard drive internally holds 40 gigs. I'm not sure on the speed (is there a way to tell?) I just ordered a Western Digital 320 gig 7200 external firewire drive.

Will I have better luck recording to the external drive via firewire, or should I record directly to my internal and use the external as storage? My processor is the weakest link and I'm looking for the best way to record without latency issues.

I don't actually know that I will have latency issues as I don't have any of the recording gear in yet.

EDIT: I only have one 4 pin T.I. Firewire port, so the firepod will be plugged in the computer and the hard drive will be daisy chained off the firepod. I don't know if that will slow things down or not.
 
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generally speaking you want to record to a non system drive

as far as tracking goes once once a cpu crosses minimum threshold it's clock speed has little impact on 'latency'

if you are trying to add FX with high processor (lots of calculations, most demanding reverbs for example) demands that will drag down & even stall the system, as will complex VSTi's. A system that doesn't break a sweat tracking 24 simultaneous 24 bit, as 32 bit floating point, voices, will chatter and stall frequently on several acoustic piano VSTi's (including Native Instrument)

The firewire buss will support data moving both directions for a bunch of streaming channels. A week or two ago I revisited the math but to tell you the truth I don't remember the theoretical track count. The ultimate bottle neck here is going to be the 'system' and how well the pass through is implemented.

the 4 pin firewire is a full data bus it just doesn't provide power so other then the physical weaknesses inherent in most of the four pin sockets 4 or 6 doesn't really matter. A card bus TI chip firewire card should cost no more then $60 (US) and would provide a separate firewire bus. If your various devices pass through is implemented correctly distinct buses for I & O is not mandatory. Partially because I got in on this stuff on the ground that is the way i tend to go, separate bus for I & O.

It is unlikely that your system drive is faster then 5400 and @ 40 gig might well be 4800. So in addition to it generally being a good idea to not track to the system drive it's rpm, in all likelihood, will make it a not particularly satisfying recording medium. newer HD's will have rpm printed on drive but from the model number you can go to the manfc web site and get specs

Any SMART HD (most of them anymore) will return an average seek time from the HD sensors anything above 9ms is going to be consistantly problematic for audio work. But no single number, including RPM is going to tell the full story.

good luck
 
That's what I was hoping to hear. My firewire socket shows Texas Instruments drivers when I look them up in system, so I'm hoping I won't need a pcmcia firewire card.
 
I would also recommend getting a pcmcia card, because using the firepod with the laptop is going to use up a lot of the laptop's resources, this will cause latency, cracks, pops, etc... Cards that have worked well with our products, include the ADS PYRO 1394 from Rain Recording and pcmcia card bus from SIIG.

-jpleasant@presonus.com
 
What's the advantage of a pcmcia card over my built in firewire port? Wouldn't I be using less resources by going with the built in, because the only drivers running would be the Firepod drivers and the Texas Instruments drivers?

If I went pcmcia, I would be using the card slot drivers, the firewire card drivers, and the firepod drivers.

And isn't this all pretty little use of resource anyways because the Firepod will be handling the bulk of the communication? (Unlike with a USB interface.)
 
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