Firewire too slow for 96k. Whats your max trackcount?

[Jonathan Starr]

Started tracking at 96k and ran up against the limit for drive throughput.

We did fine with around 16 audio tracks running. When we expanded to over 20 audio tracks plus a bunch of aux & midis, I started to get the "firewire drive too slow or fragmented" message.

The same session runs fine when I dither it down to 48k.

How many audio tracks do others get at 96?

My mirror ball tells me I see a big, fast internal drive in my future, with the firewires serving as backup and data exchange.

PT HD 2 Accel, Powermac G4 1 GHZ Mirror Doors, 1.75MB Ram, Glyph 80gig firewire 400 drive, Tiger & PT 6.92.

[Jonathan Starr]

Has anyone else faced this issue ?

[max cooper]

Jonathan:

I've never tried to run that many track at 96, but I did record to two SATA drives in a RAID scheme once with no problems. Wouldn't that get you around the Firewire limit?

[the Merch]

Are you sure it's the firewire bus and not the drive speed?

I have a G5 PT 6.9 HD3 + Glyph Gt103 (great drives). Never had any probs with track count but not tried 96K. I think it's your drive, firewire is (suposidley) twice the speed of any stanard drive, so if you had two or three drives on one bus i could see the problem.

Tell me if i'm wrong!!!

dfegad

[matt thomas]

the firewire bus itself should be fast enough, but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and it sound like maybe the actuall drive may not be fast enough (but I doubt it, have you tried reformatting it?), the drives themselves aren't actually firewire, just the bus its connected to is. Oh and you've only got one and three quarter megabytes of RAM

[catfish11]

i can't remember the specs but that sounds about right for firewire 400, maybe you should be gettinga bit more but not much

you have 3 choices , round robin, meaning multiple firewire for limited tracks in each, you set this up in protools (not recommended, for various reasons)
or, internal drives which are going to be much faster
by at least 50% or,
if you only have an accl 2 you should have an extra slot
get a sata controller card and get the western digital 10,000 sata 73 gig this will give the speed, use firewire for back-up
even a regular ide internal will dust firwire 400

[max cooper]

Originally Posted by catfish11

even a regular ide internal will dust firwire 400

This fact always makes me wonder why Firewire drives have become the de facto record volume. I've yet to record to a Firewire drive; it just doesn't make sense to me.

[Jonathan Starr]

I tried reformatting. I have two external drives and I get the same issue with each. I read about splitting the tracks among several firewire drives on the Digidesign site, but that idea sounds scary.

I've ordered a second internal drive, and hopefully it will do the job and allow me to use the firewire units for backup and transfer.

I felt I had to dig around a bit in the PT literature to find mention of this. In the Getting Started HD guide, it says "Qualified Fire Wire drives yield up to 24 tracks per drive with 24-bit audio." I think the "up to" refers to 48khz.

In the Compatability area of the Support website, there is a chart for track count with Fire Wire 400 drives. At 96khz it lists 12 tracks per drive. At 192khz 6 tracks, and 44.1/48khz 24 tracks per drive.

So my 20 audio tracks is definitely over their supported track count for one drive.

SATA drives are qualified for 32 tracks at 48khz, which I assume would translate to 16 tracks at 96khz.

Looks like even with a good internal SATA drive I may not have the horsepower to run 96k.

[kudzu]

ran into the same problem....its definately the speed of the drive....I had to install 10,000rpm internal sata drive and then split the audio files for each song btw two drives to get it to work....Live kit, bass and gtrs from one drive.... vocals, overdubs from the other drive....comfortably got to 36 tracks @ 88.2 Khz/24bit .....takes a wee bit more file management but I think its worth it sonically.....

[Improv]

running PTHD 6.9 on a G5 (at least 1.8, one system dual 2.0) with EZquest Cobra drives (most of them 80 gigs... larger ones seem to fragment and corrupt more easily), we're able to get over 32 tracks of 96k playback off one drive at level 2 DAE buffer. Heavy edits obviously require a bigger buffer or consolidation at 96k.

It's the drive, not the protocol, i think.

[XHipHop]

When I asked the Lynx guys when they would do firewire, their response was "when is firewire going to do us?" They explained that firewire, at this point, can not handle 16 channels of 192k so that's why you won't see it for the aurora stuff.

Just thought I'd add in a little anecdote from AES.

Oh, I've done 32 tracks over firewire before on a mac G4.

[jonnyclueless]

I haven't delved in much, but I have a friend who uses 96k a lot and uses well over 64 tracks using 2 firewire drives. I asked how he does the allocation. He basically just works off one drive during tracking. When the drive gets too slow, he bounces and works off a ref mix. Then for mixing splits it across two drives to play everything at once.

[djui5]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Starr

44.1/48khz 24 tracks per drive.

That's a bunch of crap. I've seen 60+tracks run off firewire at 44.1/48. 96 it won't happen though.

Get SCSI if you wanna run 96. It's safer that way.

[jonnyclueless]

Originally Posted by djui5

That's a bunch of crap. I've seen 60+tracks run off firewire at 44.1/48. 96 it won't happen though.

Get SCSI if you wanna run 96. It's safer that way.

The only problem with SCSI is that the drive sizes are so small. With 96k it wouldnt be unheard of to take up most of a 32G drive for one song (well, maybe 2).

[djui5]

Originally Posted by jonnyclueless

The only problem with SCSI is that the drive sizes are so small. With 96k it wouldnt be unheard of to take up most of a 32G drive for one song (well, maybe 2).

Last time I was at the studio (it's been a couple weeks, I turned in my keys and am building my own mix room now) I ordered 4 250GB SCSI drives and put them into the Glyph carriages to load into a Glyph trip rack. This was ordered to record a 5hr live show (with 2 back up drives) at 48. It would have taken double this at 96, or recorded it with no backups.

250Gb should do it if you ask me. Seegate Cheetah's. paid $1,000 for all 4 of them, shipped overnight.

I had calculations for how much disk space 96 eat's up somewhere. I think you could do a record with a 250GB drive easily.


The problem I'm seeing with these other drives, firewire and SATA, is the seeks times are so high. This is murderous when doing mixing ITB. If your just using a DAW for a tape machine, and your edits are rendered and tracks consolidated, sure...they're fine, but when doing sierous work, SCSI is the only one's that work for me.

[Bishbashbosh]

If you have a look at the DUC, there are plenty of guys there running way more than 50 tracks at 96 on internal SATA drives.

One poster even talked of getting in excess of 80 tracks off one 15k internal SATA!....
(although he did mention that the drive was REALLY noisy!)

Firewire is great for backups, and handy for portable rigs, but for serious track count it's got to be SCSI, or SATA.... (and seeing as how SATA is so much cheaper, I think it probably wins hands down)

[not_so_new]

Originally Posted by Bishbashbosh

If you have a look at the DUC, there are plenty of guys there running way more than 50 tracks at 96 on internal SATA drives.

One poster even talked of getting in excess of 80 tracks off one 15k internal SATA!....
(although he did mention that the drive was REALLY noisy!)

Firewire is great for backups, and handy for portable rigs, but for serious track count it's got to be SCSI, or SATA.... (and seeing as how SATA is so much cheaper, I think it probably wins hands down)

An internal 15k SATA? And who makes that? The only SATA drive that I know of above 7200 is the Raptor running at 10K.

[C_F_H_13]

Originally Posted by djui5

That's a bunch of crap. I've seen 60+tracks run off firewire at 44.1/48. 96 it won't happen though.

Get SCSI if you wanna run 96. It's safer that way.

Totally RIGHT!!! I've run 88 audio tracks, and 16 midi tracks at 44.1 on 1 firewire 400 drive.

I can get about 48-60 tracks at 96k but I use firewire 800 when I get into the high sampling rates.

My general drive plan for 96k is two 250gig Lacie Firewire 800 drives. Drums,Guitars on one, Bass,vocals,synths on another. With this system I can max out my track count in pro tools.

[jcschild]

a single internal Sata or IDE will do at least 120 tracks 48k
the same will do at least 40 96k

a raid array will do more
spliting tracks is another way around it.

Firewire even 800 will never be as fast as internal or have the same bandwidth.

Scsi is dead for audio. unless you have to go external. since your on a mac you may have to.

Scott
ADK

[Jonathan Starr]

Can anyone suggest a backup strategy for projects split across multiple drives?

Right now I just "save a copy in" my backup drive every once in a while. Will that still work?

[Kestral]

Are we talking about Firewire 400 or 800 here?

On a Firewire 800 drive, I've been able to do over 50 tracks at 24 bit 96K using Pro Tools HD2 on a dual 1.8 ghz G5 no problem. The drive is a LaCie 250 GB with triple interface (using the FW800) and 8 mb buffer.

[C_F_H_13]

Originally Posted by Jonathan Starr

Can anyone suggest a backup strategy for projects split across multiple drives?

Right now I just "save a copy in" my backup drive every once in a while. Will that still work?

Yes this will work, but I use RETROSPECT. ( www.retrospect.com )

My backup sceme is like this:

Work Drive 1 and Work Drive 2 are both retrospected to 2 separate drives called "company name" Backup A1 and "company name" Backup A2. The backup drives are general 1 Terrabyte Lacie Drives. I back up daily to avoid losing anything. Once I fill up an "A Set", I move onto..you guessed it... "B Set".

Backup A1 is the main backup drive that I would actually keep around in case we need files or alt. mixes and whatnot. Backup A2 goes into a "tape vault" (no tape in there) where I keep the backups of all tracks my company has ever worked on.

You can do this for as many drives as you want, but I always recommend at least 2 backups being made. If I had my way I would do them to different medias as well. One to a drive, one to DVD or something else. But let's be honest, who wants a shitpile of DVDs lying around.

Retropsect makes it easy to bring things back. Worked on a song 6 years ago on your old Mix 24 system? Retrospect can search by date or files names, find a disk image, and restore. Takes no time at all.

Hope this helps