Firewire 400, 800, ATA -- which is best?

[plurye]

Re hard drives, a few questions for anyone who knows:

1. Which will give better results with VI in my Mac dual 2.5Ghz, OS 10.4.8 -- ATA or Firewire?

2. Significant difference in performance betw FW 400 and 800 for VI?

3. Any makes/models people like/love?

Thanks,
Peter

[cm]

peter, whereas firewire describes the connection from an enclosure to your computer's FW-controller ATA is a type of harddisk (in almost all FW-enclosures you will find ATA-disks)
the best would be sATA (serial ATA) if your G5 provides it or you can add an sATA controller directly connected to an sATA II disk.
the second best option would be ATA directly, because every translation of protocols costs performance.
if you don't have to connect 2-3 FW disks you're fine with FW400, otherwise use FW-800.
never, never, have a FW audio interface and a disk on one bus (and i have learned lately that built in FW on the mac has only one bus for 800 and 400, though we noticed it works, whereas having both on the FW400 bus does not work in most cases)
christian

edit: above should read if you don't have to connect more than 2-3 FW disks

[musos]

A few months ago, I installed an external sATA solution and I'm very happy with it. There's a PCI-X card which provides for 8 connections to sATA drives. Then there's a case which contains 4 drives (enough for me at present).
Here: http://www.sonnettech.com/">http://www.sonnettech.com/

All the crashes and problems I used to have with Firewire drives are now history and I can concentrate on making music.....

Regards - Colin

[plurye]

Thanks, CM. For the moment I went with an internal Seagate sATA drive to start getting to know VI -- will install it next week.

Peter