@Nick Batzdorf said:
My understanding is that disks of all sizes cost the same to make. The difference is that the yield is lower for larger ones. (Which of course negates my first sentence, but the point remains!)
Not exactly. Higher capacities demand higher precision these times. 3.5" are 3.5" since a few years, the things that cahnged are the magnetic tracks coming together more and more. It's indeed easier and less expensive to produce with less precision. The speed increases with the packing, but also is lost on correction of read errors. Apart from that, heat problems that may arise with increasing the spinning speed could also be part of the issue.
Peter, I don't think you will get problems with Tascam. Also with 2.5 the 160 voices couldn't be reached on every system. I myself still think it's not worth the cost of the faster drives, 2 or 3 7200rpm drives should give enough polyphony, as long as there is a limit to the maximum of 2 GB RAM for precaching the files. Still I'd like to see some experiments testing the preformance when prebuffering is set lower than it is right now in 2.5 (I think 64kb per stereo sample) - but I guess therefore HD seektimes significantly lower than 9ms are needed.
PolarBear