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  • eSATA drives for VI - question

    M
    M
    Hi folks,

    With VI part 2 on its way, I now MUST make a decision about more drive space. (I've been putting it off till now to see if any new stuff enters the market)

    I've looked at miniG and similar stuff (multi drive enclosures) and have just found this from Lacie:
    [URL=http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10490]LaCie Two Big 1TB[/URL]
    Does anyone have any experience with this thing? I reckon 1 TB should be enough to host all the VI samples, plus a backup. Alternatively, all the VI stuff plus a backup of VSL pro ed - then I'd backup the VI samples to 2 firewire drives.

    Comments and/or suggestions would be most welcome from the wonderful minds at this forum.

    My current system:
    Dual 2.5 Mac running OS 10.4.6 (non-Intel, so a PCI-X card will work)

    Regards - Colin
  • N
    N
    I've been using the Sonnet 4+4 eSATA card for a couple of months without incident. However, I don't have any eSATA boxes, I have a bracket that mounts drives inside the G5 case.
  • P
    P
    Hi musos...

    I looked a lot into this not long ago - I have the same issues with drive space....

    I have decided on the same route as Nick...ie: internal SATA's with a sonnet card.

    Looks a tidy solution.....

    Nick.....one Q - any noise issues with the cooling fan inside the G5 running like a 747 boeing engine due to the addition of the new drives - or nothing hasty to report?

    Thnx

    PM
  • S
    S
    PaulM


    hey,

    the link on the PM you sent took me to the forums page....it didn't work .......just tell me the thread name.....thanx,

    hope all is well [;)]

    SvK
  • N
    N
    Nope, Paul, no cooling fan problems. I monitor the machine with the following utility periodically, and I haven't seen anything that looks unusual.

    http://www.bresink.com/osx/HardwareMonitor.html
  • P
    P
    Nick - great - thats good to hear.

    SvK...Let me find the thread again....and also....have you thought of installing another 4 GB of RAM and your VSL Pro Ed Library running in Kontakt in your 2nd G5 to get even more VSL content running.....and if you had thought of it I was curious why you haven't done it?

    I am still on the fence with the whole G5 slaves versus PC slaves thing - bit of a head trip....

    PaulM
  • J
    J
    I've 4 Western digital 400GB drives in a miniG enclosure connected to a G5 2.5 dual via a Sonnet 4+4 eSata card.

    It has been very reliable and works well with both the Pro Edition and Vienna Instruments. Make sure you download the recently posted drivers for the sonnet card as this improves drive recognition.

    julian
  • G
    G
    Nick -- how many drives do you have in that G5, 4 additional over the 2 in the normal drive bay? And which kit did you go with? Thanks.

    Gary
  • J
    J
    Musos,

    Regarding your original post, I can't recommend those LaCie drives. Some of the the 'Big' and 'Bigger' drives are are RAID 0 two-drive configurations. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld says.) However they generate enough heat to cause failures with the type of fast access demands that VSL places on them in larger arrangements. LaCie is a great company and makes great products. This just isn't the right application for that specific family of LaCie drives.

    Speaking from painful personal experience. Also there have been several threads in this forum regarding those drives. One VSL employee had similar heat problems with one of these types of drives.

    The eSATA (external or internal) is really a great way to go if you have an extra PCI card slot available. If that doesn't work for you because of slot issues then you could save some money and get a couple of FW drives to hang off a FW800 port of your G5.

    My own solution (for a G5) was to get an ultaSCSI card and use an external 4-bay enclosure. I put two 300GB SCSI drives in a RAID 0 for the VSL VI and another similar drive (non-RAID) for recording from Pro Tools. I wasn't real happy about only have two card slots left for Pro Tools but the system stability has been worth it. I now use my previous FW drives mainly for backup.

    To date it has been very stable with fast loading times for the VI.

    Best regards,
    Jack
  • J
    J
    I've been a tad unhappy with my FW performance-- a trio of Glyph GT080s. They are great drives, durable and quiet, but the demands of VI seem to overwhelm the FW busses. What I'd like to do is use these for printing audio and archiving projects rather than to run VIs.

    The Sonnet eSATA controller was mentioned above. The miniG and/or La Cie sound a *little* like overkill: 1 TB = longer seek times? Longer, faster spin- hence heat? I do recall that two smaller drives were recommended for the Cube, so some of this makes sense.

    Is there one PCI hub for eSATA that can be recommended over another? Any one's that should be avoided?

    As for drives, I'm considering a series of these
    http://www.technoavenue.com/gt050q1f-300.html

    The Glyphs have rendered the best performance than any drive I've ever owned-- and the prices aren't too bad. Thoughts?

    ...and just one rhetorical thought: 10k+ rpm drives just don't seem that they'll ever drop to more reasonable prices or increase in size....

    Thnx,
    JWL
  • N
    N
    http://www.g5drivebracket.com/

    That's the one I bought, Gary. I'm not sure whether I'd pick that one rather than any of the others, but at the time it was either that or the billion dollar Wiebetech one that was ludicrously expensive - which I didn't even consider.

    The bracket holds three over the two in the normal drive bay, but I only have two (total four drives) in at the moment. I'm not using RAID or anything exotic - I just needed extra storage. However, I'm about to put a 36GB Raptor from one of my Windows machines in there as well (I'm replacing it with a 500GB drive in that machine and may as well use it).

    I'll post if I have any heat problems, but it seems unlikely that I will.

    Oh, and a tip: if you install a bracket in your G5, do a search on the Apple site to see how you remove the optical drive. You need to get it out of the way so you can plug in the power cables you need to run over there. It just unplugs from the motherboard and slides right out, but it may take a slight tug the first time and you'll be stuck if you don't know how it works.

    The instructions for the drive bracket go into too much detail about everything but that, and it's the only thing that's not entirely straightforward. It would have taken me ten minutes if I'd known about that, but instead it took me over an hour.

    It's true that I'm not mechanically inclined - in fact I'm a total DIY putz - but this certainly isn't beyond even me. [:)]
  • M
    M
    Thanks to everyone who replied - much appreciated!!
    To summarise:
    Big LaCie drives = no good / too hot etc etc (thanks Jack!)
    eSATA = works / several options here (thanks Nick, Paul, Julian)

    So, off to do more research and thinking....
    Damn, it's hard to be able to just make music these days! [:@]

    Thanks and regards - Colin
  • G
    G
    Thanks for the info Nick, and sure, would like to know what temps those drives are running at down the line.

    Best,
    Gary