Quote:
Originally Posted by Roland  at full track count and 96khz I make that around 8 meg a second, sustained. |
Actually, I think it's closer to 14MB/s... and that's not even considering the fact that it's writing 48 separate files simultaneously.
I was only recording 36 tracks, which I calculated to be around 10MB/s.
But, let's put it this way... over FW400 on a MacBook Pro, any decent modern drive manages 20MB/s sustained without a problem, and a large drive cache (pref 16MB) takes the pressure off when there are spikes.
In theory the internal X-48 drive will go way faster than that thanks to the SATA connection. (Same goes for internal drives on PCs/Macs)
But so much for the theory - as I say, the X-48's internal drive seemed to have more difficulty keeping up than the external firewire drive. Fragmentation? Crummy drive? Who knows.
Usefully, there's a drive benchmarking utility on the X-48 which writes some test files for a minute or so and reports back how many tracks the target drive will support at 48 and 96kHz. On a plain LaCie external firewire drive, it said "48 tracks at 48kHz, 48 tracks at 96kHz". Which surprised me (in a good way), so who am I to argue?
I find people tend to get a bit paranoid about data rates and access times. Modern drives do really shift it. But I agree, 48 tracks of 96kHz is getting into the danger zone for a single drive. And yeah, I've also been burned when unwittingly using FW-IDE bridge boards from certain manufacturers.
Like Pyramix, the HD24 makes a big deal of the fact that all the data is interleaved, so it's only reading/writing to a single file. But there are plenty of HD recorders like the X-48 that do create separate files for each track, and never miss a beat. The advantage of this is that you can record to an external drive, and just hand the drive to the client at the end of the night. No exporting or translation required. We're so up against it for time on a lot of gigs that this is a real benefit.