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  4. SATA and eSATA - best external hard drive options?

  • SATA and eSATA - best external hard drive options?

    C
    C
    I'm looking at hard drives and confess I'm more of a composer than a techy. I see SATA and eSATA in some threads and it seems to be talked about favorably. Can someone tell me how/if it's better than Firewire 800, what the difference is between SATA and eSATA, and any recommended hard drives and 34mm ExpressCards (I'm on a MacBook Pro)?

    Much appreciated.
  • J
    J
    If a new hard drive is being considered, I would recommend not going with FW for best performance.

    SATA is the standard drive format for internals.

    The 'e' in eSATA stands for "external". A special PCI card is needed with proper ports for eSATA. Pretty much the same SATA hard drive can be placed in an enclosure with proper eSATA ports which are in turn connected to the eSATA host PCI card.

    There are two common formats of eSATA-- eSATA I (or just plain eSATA) and eSATA II-- which has a faster transfer rate.

    If this isn't too geeky for you, it might explain things more clearly and more accurately:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

    eSATA II would be first recommendation.

    For MBPs, there are also eSATA cards available for your PCM slot.
  • C
    C
    Not too geeky at all - very helpful - thanks! I'll go with the eSATA II configuration.
  • D
    D
    cf, curious if you confirmed that the chaining of the firewire devices was your problem. That you are looking at other drive interfaces would hint that this is the case.
  • C
    C
    dbudde - thanks for asking, sorry I didn't clarify. I did indeed confirm that the very specific problem was that VSL's samples are too memory-intensive to allow me to keep my present configuration.

    Presently I have my 500g WD 7200rpm 8.9ms external hard drive plugged directly into my firewire 400 port (early version of MacBook Pro - only one slot, only 400, no 800). I then had my MOTU Ultralite piggy-backed into the open firewire slot on my external hard drive. Even just loading a single highly optimized VSL patch (1MB ram used, 1200MB Ram free) caused heavy crackling, and when trying to actually play it in a track, the sound disappeared immediately. (FYI - less memory-intensive third-party samples were never affected by this config.)

    I tried many variations on the above configuration, but the only one that worked was to detach the MOTU Ultralite completely and run all sound locally through the computer's speaker or headset. With this config, I could plug in a dozen VSL instruments and run it all without an issue. So piggybacking is just too much for the system to handle - can't push enough 1's and 0's through the one Firewire 400 to keep both the hard drive and the MOTU moving along with the VSL samples.

    Since I only have the one Firewire 400 port on my early version MB Pro, the obvious solution was to turn the 34mm ExpressCard slot into a new double Firewire 800 slot. As I researched this, I saw the eSATA configuration and decided that was an even better option than firewire 800.

    Hopefully this can help the next person. It was pretty frustrating to spend my three-day weekend completely immersed in this issue instead of composing for the documentary I'm under deadline to finish. But if it can save the next person some time I suppose it was worth it.
  • D
    D
    glad you got it worked out.