External drive options for MacBook Pro

[MartinL]

Hi all,

I might be getting a MacBook Pro pretty soon, and was wondering what would be the best hard drive option for using VI. The MacBook Pro has a Firewire 800 interface. Can I get good performance with such a drive? A quick search on this forum seems to show that the best option would be an SATA drive, but that can't really be done with a portable computer right?

Any recommandations?

Thanks!

[cm]

external sATA connectors are rare so far, but FW800 would be basically fine too.
a few comments: a) see if you get an external drive with an FW800 plug + internal sATA disk, b) be careful if using simultaneously a FW-audio interface - most of them but not all allow flawless streaming then (mostly a driver issue i'd assume)
christian

[hermitage59]

For what it's worth Martin, I'm using a FW drive with a sata disk inside on FW 400 on my old G4 laptop whilst i'm travelling/studying/working here in russia. It works well, but i caution you to buy a box with a fan, or some sort of adequate cooling. My little sample collection is nowhere near the size of VSL's VI collection, and the first box i bought had no cooling to speak of. It ran rather warm, and concerned me to the extent that i changed the box for one with dedicated cooling.
I'm considering a cardbus (PCMCIA) external sata setup, so if i pursue this, i'll post some comments.

Good Luck.

Alex.

[cm]

the *successor* of PCMCIA, called expresscard or expresscard 34, has already available sATA II adapters .... eg. from sonnet ...
christian

[hermitage59]

@cm said:

the *successor* of PCMCIA, called expresscard or expresscard 34, has already available sATA II adapters .... eg. from sonnet ...
christian

hehe, steady on there Christian, not so fast.
I need time to absorb all this new technology.

Why, I've only just swapped the candles for electric light bulbs!



[[:|]] [:D] [:P]

[cm]

speed up ... apogee has also announced an expresscard

[brollyman]

We're using a Lacie FW800 650 Gig drive with our macbook pro, it seems fine , we have our whole sample library on it & we also stream the quicktime movies into Digital performer from it as well, I think it's a little heavy to lug around in a rucksack though, so we have a duplicate drive in the studio.
best wishes
brolly

[MartinL]

@cm said:

be careful if using simultaneously a FW-audio interface - most of them but not all allow flawless streaming then (mostly a driver issue i'd assume)

The MacBook Pro has a Firewire 400 and a Firewire 800. Are you saying that having an audiio interface on the FW400 and a drive on the FW800 might possibly cause problems?

[cm]

i have no technical information in detail about the probook, but a user here in the forum pointed out that there is only one controller for both ports.
chris kardeis made some streaming tests lately for example with a fireface 400 which turned up to successfully co-exist with a FW-drive, but there have been several cases with other devices where the streaming dropped - IMO it's primary a driver problem with some FW-soundcards.
christian

[MartinL]

Thanks for your reply. From the sound of it, since I can connect eSATA drives thorugh the ExpressCard, I think it would be the best option.

BTW, I was at Christian Kardeis Montreal presentation a few weeks ago, and I would be curious to know what kind of setup he had? He was on a MacBook of somekind. External drive? Audio interface? Thanks.

[cm]

not 100% sure now, but i'd assume it was our *old* pro book core duo (not the core 2 duo), the fireface 400 and a harddisk connected via USB
christian

[Tripit]

@cm said:

be careful if using simultaneously a FW-audio interface - most of them but not all allow flawless streaming then (mostly a driver issue i'd assume)

The MacBook Pro has a Firewire 400 and a Firewire 800. Are you saying that having an audiio interface on the FW400 and a drive on the FW800 might possibly cause problems?

I may be wrong here, but I've been told that mac busses aren't really seperate busses. So if you use a 400 and an 800, the buss speed will be 400 for both.

On another note, I have an OWC 500 gig (400) on my 1st gen macbook pro with and it's just fine with VSI.

[elksman]

Hi MartinL -
Not clear to me why you've resigned yourself to not being able to use your ExpressCard port for eSATA? I have the i.connect eSATA 3.0Gb card, in the ExpressCard slot on a ThinkPad T60p and it SMOKES. I dropped a 560MB file from external to internal SATA drives on the T60p, and it took about 15 seconds. I couldn't believe it.
Hope that helps,
Eric

[MartinL]

@elksman said:

Hi MartinL -
Not clear to me why you've resigned yourself to not being able to use your ExpressCard port for eSATA? I have the i.connect eSATA 3.0Gb card, in the ExpressCard slot on a ThinkPad T60p and it SMOKES. I dropped a 560MB file from external to internal SATA drives on the T60p, and it took about 15 seconds. I couldn't believe it.
Hope that helps,
Eric

Thanks Eric. Yes, ExpressCard + eSATA seems the way to go. Before starting this thread, I didn't even know that it was possible to do. Thanks to this forum, now I know! [:)]

[Nordkrog]

Hi,
I'm thinking of getting me a Macbook Pro to use with my firewire 800 extreme Lacie disk, and I'm just wondering about this eSATA thing. Will I really get better performance out of it? I know the transfer rate is much higher on SATA 2 (300MB/s vs FW800's 100 MB/s) but I alsp see that the Burst rates are similar. Anyone out there who has some qualified knowledge about this ? [:)]

Flemming

[cm]

it is just a question of translating and providing protocols ....
sATA controllers in an express34 slot would support NCQ and so help to reduce latency requesting data.
FW800 would not support this feature (since it is only a connection protocol) and the the question is what drive is sitting in the FW-enclosure - pATA or sATA. if the latter then question is if the FW-to-sATA controller there would even support NCQ.
in a nutshell: sATA is much *closer* to memory and processor than FW, the data throughput would be limited in any case by the harddisk itself.
christian

[Nordkrog]

Thanks Christian, you're really my man these days! [:)]

Just wondering: The disk I use now (Lacie extreme 600 GB) contains 2 harddrives that performs in a kind of "raid" way (as far as I get it...) it means the disk is quite faster than other FW-disks using one internal disk only. Does anyone knows if a solution with one single eSATA disk is still better? I can't find any SATA disks bigger than 500GB... (and I need more space...) As you can tell from this, I'm a bit confused about the terms SATA and eSATA. But I assume that eSATA means the express card that you can put in your macbook and here you can connect any SATA drive, right?

[*-)] Flemming

[cm]

sATA just describes the connection type, it exists in two flavours currently sATA I (1,5 Gb/s) and sATA II (3 Gb/s)
unfortunately the term eSATA is used for *enhanced* as well as for *external* - in fact the max. allowed cable lenght of eSATA is 2 m instead of 1 m and the connectors are slightly changed (more robust) and eSATA has always to be sATA II

there is a sATA 750 GB disk from seagate, a very fast device although only 7200 rpm because it uses perpendicular recording (means magnetic material is arranged vertical instead of horizontal to the magnetic disk)
christian