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  4. eSATA drives and VSL?
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    @Nathan Allen Pinard said:

    I'm not looking at doing this yet, if I even need it. I run VSL samples off of those two glyph drives. I have problems with my strings. I have to play the whole song through to get them to stay in the cache. When first playing them they have to kind of "load" in, so the HD goes crazy.

    Are you sure that this is a drive problem, and not partially because of the way the OS handles memory?

    DG
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    It's in the Vienna Instruments section, recently added, that addresses the way my Macbook and G5 seem to handle memory. VE programs that load on my Macbook are closing prematurely on my G5 and I'm beginning to draw the conclusion that VE handles memory on the G5 and Intel differently. Thoughts? Thanks, Fitz
  • M
    M

    To Nathan,

    For the record, I bought an eSATA card and drive box from Sonnet:

    [URL=http://www.sonnettech.com/product/storagesolutions/index.html]Sonnet storage solutions[/URL] 

    I have 4 drives, for VSL and for backups. 

    Though I haven't come near to pushing the setup to the limits, I'm very impressed with the ease of use and reliability. 

    Regards - Colin 
  • S
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    For anyone considering the purchase of an eSATA card, drives and enclosures I again strongly suggest going to www.amug.com (website of the Arizona Mac Users Group). The reviews on this website are comprehensive and detailed covering many different aspects of product design and capability - - things like drive temperatures in different enclosures, different capabilities of different SATA cards, tests of may different hard drives, etc. You will find out things significant in making purchasing decsions. For example, as I noted earlier, currently only Areca and Highpoint make cards that support booting a MacPro from a drive or array attached to the card, both cards use the same processor and appear to have similar designs, but the Highpoint card is more than $200 less expensive than the Areca card. You will also find that arrays created with these cards have pretty spectacular performance - - for example, average read/write speed for an 8 drive RAID 6 array (a RAID 6 array can suffer the loss of two drives without losing data and can rebuild itself after the loss of two drives) is 485MBS write and 501MBS read.

  • S
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    Isn't it true that one can connect an eSATA external drive directly to the motherboard? I think I have read it in some forum.

    I have several Seagate Free Agent Pro drives that have eSTAT ports. If it's not posible to conect them directly to the motherboar then would this card do it? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815283005 

    sasha 
  • S
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    Sasha:

    There is a difference between SATA and eSATA in terms of connectors. Motherboards and SATA drive mechanisms come with SATA ports. (As CM noted earlier, all modern motherboards come with SATA II ports.) These are for internal connection of SATA drives. When external SATA enclosures first appeared they had the same kind of connectors as those on the drive mechanisms and motherboards. Experience showed that these connectors were not robust enough for external enclosures where they would have to survive repeated insertions and removals of cables. As a result a new kind of connector, eSATA, was developed for external SATA drive enclosures. External drives housed in eSATA enclosures can be run from the motherboard by wiring some of the SATA ports on the motherboard with SATA to eSATA cables - - the eSATA end of the cable being attached to an open slot on the rear of the computer. The device pictured at

    http://www.usb-ware.com/sata-dual-internal-esata-adapter.htm

    is an example of this kind of device.

    (The MacPro has two unused SATA ports on its motherboard, Newer Technology makes a similar device, called an eSATA extender cable for connecting these ports to an empty slot on the back of the computer. However, installation is, reputedly, a delicate affair and the drives cso connected do not have hot swap capability.) You can see this device at: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/MPQXES2/

    After installing the cable from motherboard SATA ports to an eSATA connector affixed to an empty slot on the back of the computer, an eSATA to eSATA cable connects to the eSATA ports on the computer. Alternately, you can purchase a card PCI-X or PCIe SATA cards with external eSATA ports. Either solution would allow you to use external drives such as the Seagate Free Agent Pro drives you mention. However, connecting to ports on the motherboard may not - - as is the case with the MacPro - - allow you to hot swap drives in an external enclosure, while most SATA cards do allow hot swapping.

    You don't mention what kind of computer you have or whether whether it has free PCI-X or PCIe slots, etc. This would be important information to know when advising you. I am also not familiar with card you mention. If you have a Mac (or even if you don't - - since all enclosures and most cards will work with Windows machines or Macs) there are comprehensive reviews of SATA cards and enclosures at www.amug.com.

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    I wish I had a bit of imagination and knowledge about these internal connectors. Might have saved me a few bucks. As it is, I have a Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P PCIe arriving in the mail today. I tried two Seritek 2SE2-E's, but could not get the drivers to install, and was hesitant about installing the drivers manually when I might try to get a better card. We will see. My drives are GlyphTech GT050Q's which are small enough to be portable and include a nice case. They work great with my MB Pro. Now trying to get them to work on my new Mac Pro is the challenge. Personally, my advice is to stick to larger companies when looking for a SATA card, and take your time. Support and user base is important in determining what will work together on whatever rig you have. Also consider whether you want to RAID them...drive manufact is important with card manufact.
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    Stephen,

    Thanks for taking your time and for a detailed advise.

    I use PC and the motherboard has two unused SATA connettions. So I will get the sata to esata cable or the converter card and will conect it to my free agent drives. Currently I rhave the cube spread between those two and run them through firewire and usb2 and they are just not fast enough.

    sasha 
  • cmC
    VSL Team
    cmC

    the plug-and-play support for sATA appears to be somehow pre-mature ... on XP i found out disks show up after scanning drives in Disk Management (Computer Management) - Menu Action, SubMenu Scan Drives. this is very similar to resetting the SCSI bus on earlier windows versions ...

    maybe the disk utility on OS X provides a similar function ...

    christian

    and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.
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    Today I finally got my eSata drives (Glyph GT050Q's) running with a Sonnet EP4. One thing that became clear was that the factory partitions resulted in slower performance , even though they were Mac Extended (Journaled). I re partitioned and it resulted in significant performance differences. I also test w and w/o journaling and saw NO significant performance differences between the two.

    Advice: Repartition your new drives with journaling on

    Being a bit crazy, I went to frys and purchased 3 SATA "green" drives for the Mac Pro internal bays, and tried RAIDING two of them - testing before and after performance

    BEFORE RAID - single drive (journaled)

    Disk Test 84.16
    Sequential 135.10
    Uncached Write 144.19 88.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 147.95 83.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 99.53 29.13 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 170.46 85.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random 61.11
    Uncached Write 24.01 2.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 199.49 63.87 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 83.80 0.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 145.98 27.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]


    AFTER RAID - two drives in RAID 0 (journaled)

    Disk Test 125.06
    Sequential 150.62
    Uncached Write 147.99 90.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 232.24 131.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 84.87 24.84 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 269.37 135.38 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random 106.92
    Uncached Write 53.94 5.71 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 414.25 132.62 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 100.96 0.72 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 152.56 28.31 MB/sec [256K blocks]

    Xbench by the way

    Reedit: I posted the wrong results in earlier post a few seconds ago
  • S
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    The WD "green" drives are designed to minimize power consumption and have, therefore, variable rotational speeds, making them exactly the opposite of ideal drives for streaming samples. They are good for data storage, however.
  • C
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    Thats ok...they were on sale and I can use them for offline storage till I find some better ones. Save some internal power. Dont really need em since I have 3 GT050Q's for samples and audio. Thanks for you input. FUN!