@Nick Batzdorf said:
Are there any 10K RPM SATA drives other than the Western Digital Raptors? The problem with them, of course, is that the largest ones are "only" 72GB.
No, these are the only ones. And as I've said elsewhere, we need to look beyond the statement of "unlimited polyphony" since the Giga brochure clearly stated that with a 2.8GHz system, they slightly doubled the existing polyphony. And this was using two IDE drives in a RAID.
Raptor drives are within a few dollars of their SCSI cousins. The 74GB drive, my cost as a dealer, is roughly $250. Quite a few motherboards come with a SATA RAID, but this is only for TWO drives. So with Vienna, you either have to justify spending $500+ to warehouse just under 150GB of data or spend $340 thereabouts to wherehouse just under 320GB using two 160GB drives. But if you want comparable to the 320GB with Raptors, then the cost is $1000 for hard drives only plus approximately $100 for the RAID card, which you'll set for 0 to have the warehousing space needed for Vienna.
At the risk of offending Tascam, I have to urge caution.
Unlimited polyphony is not really true.
The software in absence of hardware is capable of unlimited polyphony (just like how programs used to advertise themselves as being able to record unlimited audio tracks). But this is really a misnomer since software must work within a hardware environment.
The real questions are:
1. With Giga 3.0 and the current hardware available using Windows XP 32-bit, what is the polyphony possibility?
2. And at what cost so that we know the financial range of practicality?
It's great to talk about Raptors, but lets not forget the 15000RPM SCSI drives available. A 73GB 15000RPM Cheetah drive costs $530 (my cost). For 146GB in either a RAID or with just a D and E drive, we're talking $1060 for two drives and at how much polyphony for the cost? Plus at 240GB for just the Pro Edition, you need bigger drives.
I think that for now, customers are advised to get systems with the existing SATA 160GB drives in a RAID and then WAIT to see what really transpires on release.
You can always change drives later once the real performance specs have been tested and published.
Peter Alexander
www.truespec.com
310-559-3779