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GothicV Location: Canada Posts: 28	Posted - Wed Jul 23, 2003 12:18 pm  Hello! My computer came with a 5400rpm harddrive stock, and I thought that was fine, I can just add another harddrive later, a faster one. According to sources, running multiple harddrives at different speeds will just cause them to all run at the lowest drives speed. Now, my girlfriends' brother is a computer wizard, and he says there is a way to get them to work, but it's not the best choice. Would a firewire drive be the answer??? I was looking at the digidrive a while back, but the price!!! I then looked up a few western digital, ibm, and maxtor ones, that werre about $200 for 100gb @ 7200 rpm. If I used that, in a firewire port, would it run at 5400 rpms like my existing drive, or would it run at 7200? Thanks.
kylen Posts: 290	Posted - Wed Jul 23, 2003 12:27 pm  Quote: ...running multiple harddrives at different speeds will just cause them to all run at the lowest drives speed. Can you point me to the source of that statement I'd like to read more about that:???: Thanks, kylen
GothicV Location: Canada Posts: 28	Posted - Wed Jul 23, 2003 12:32 pm  ummm group of nerds, vancouver, BC??? ill cut and paste and excerpt from the email. >     I heard a "rumour" that if I were to add a second harddrive to my PC that >  it has to be the same speed, otherwise problems can occur. Is this true???   It won't cause actual problems, but both drives on the same channel will work at the slower drive's speed. I don't know what kind of set up you've got, but most likely you have two IDE channels, each capable of supporting two drives. You'll get better drive to drive transfer speed having the drives on separate channels, but then one of them is likely to be sharing a channel with a CD-ROM drive, which would slow things down when it'd being used. Also, again depending on your hardware, you might need to get an 80-conductor cable for the second channel to achieve maximum speeds.
SoloTune Location: USA Posts: 194	Posted - Wed Jul 23, 2003 1:05 pm  The "speed" thats being refered to here is the data transfer speed, not the drives RPM. A 7200 RPM drive will always spin at that speed. Where the problem comes into play is if one drive is an old ata 66 and the other is, say, an ata 133. Then your data speed, (through the ribbon cable), may be limited by the slower one.
MusicConductor Location: USA Posts: 1524	Posted - Wed Jul 23, 2003 1:15 pm  You could put a 12K RPM drive through your firewire port and it still won't transfer data any faster. The firewire port has a clocking speed that creates a ceiling limit on whatever transfer rate the drive is capable of. It wasn't too long ago that someone came up with some information about some new serial ATA drives, which seem to give a great deal of performance for the money.
jester700 Posts: 546	Posted - Wed Jul 23, 2003 8:09 pm  A "real world" test at Tom's Hardware tested a FW drive at just over 25MB/s, a bit under what modern 7200RPM drives are capable of. As for the "dumbing down" of 2 IDE drives on the same channel - if you have a modern mobo, use cables that support your fastest drive, and set DMA properly this is no longer an issue. The slowing down effect was on older gear, and modern mobos set timing independently.
cmurphy Posts: 6	Posted - Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:57 am  I have a 120 GB external Firewire harddrive and it's great for file storage...but the firewire connection is a HUGE bottleneck and slows down the transfer of data too much for recording music and video to the external drive. Actually...I haven't tried recording audio to the drive..only Video..but the Video would drop frames and durning playback would pause and then skip ahead. Audio may work a little bit better with the firewire, but I doubt it. _________________ Chad Murphy
AndyH Posts: 1425	Posted - Tue Jul 29, 2003 3:16 pm  Most motherboards have at least two channels for IDE (sometimes four channels). If you cannot meet the requirements jester700 mentioned, you can bypass the bottleneck by running the drives on separate channels. The only potential difficulty with this solution is if you have too many I/O devices to reasonably separate the fast and slow ones on different channels. Another possibility is an add-in controller card for the faster drive. This requires an open PCI slot and adequate compurter resources, but works well if you can implement it.
clintfan Location: USA Posts: 455	Posted - Tue Jul 29, 2003 5:30 pm  Firewire vs. IDE is sort of like comparing apples and oranges when you are talking about whether one drive's speed will impact the other's. Hardware-wise, they will probably compete for the same PCI bus bandwidth, but that's about all. Concerning one IDE drive slowing another IDE down, Take a look at '2 Harddrives and 2 CD-ROM's: how to hookup?' where I cite some recent research that promised(?) this is not an issue anymore, at least not at ATA66 and beyond. Hope this helps, -clintfan
GothicV Location: Canada Posts: 28	Posted - Fri Aug 01, 2003 7:35 pm  I recently was in staples, and seen a maxtor harrddrive on sale, 40 gb for $80. I bought it and plugged it in. Took about 2 minutes to install. My computer has removeable sides instead of the old fashioned romove the entire cover thing... so I was up and running in no time. I formatted it as an ntfs drive and then I turned on protools, armed 8 tracks recording at 48khz, 24 bits and pushed record. Then I left. I came back in an hour (I forgot about it lol) it was still going. I turned on another 8 tracks, left again, and it was still recording 8 as it played back the original 8 about 40 minutes later. I added an effect to each of the 16 channels, armed another 8 tracks, and pushed record. It was playing 16 tracks and recording 8 more. I finally gave up trying to mess with the system 30 minutes (of recording) later. forgive me if I sound pleased, but before i couldn't even record 8 for 10 minutes. I wired the new harddrive as slave one the first ide channel and both drives seem to work well togwether.
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Fri Aug 01, 2003 9:03 pm  Quote: then I turned on protools Protools?! Tch tch.... and we were thinking you were a Cool Edit user in trouble. But I guess we're broadminded.:) - Ozpeter
GothicV Location: Canada Posts: 28	Posted - Sun Aug 03, 2003 10:45 am  I use cool edit!! I really do! But with my stupid hardware (digi001) I can only record 2 tracks at once with cool edit. I use CEP for effects, mixing and mastering. I also use it when I'm recording a single instrument with one or 2 mics. In short, I use it for everything except live recording. Usually I use protools to record everyone playing, then I mix that down to 2 tracks, record 8 tracks of drums, load that into cool edit, add bass guitars, keys then vocals etc. protools sucks.... but I'm forced to use it
ozpeter Location: Australia Posts: 3200	Posted - Sun Aug 03, 2003 6:28 pm  Ah yes, I'd forgotten your previous posts relating to the 001. Pass, friend, and welcome!
MusicConductor Location: USA Posts: 1524	Posted - Sun Aug 03, 2003 9:12 pm  (whew, good save) Glad to see you're on board!
GothicV Location: Canada Posts: 28	Posted - Sun Aug 03, 2003 9:34 pm
motorhead6 Posts: 193	Posted - Tue Aug 05, 2003 12:34 pm  Dont firewires run serial? If they do I dont really see how they could be any good but I dont really know.
jester700 Posts: 546	Posted - Tue Aug 05, 2003 3:23 pm  motorhead6 wrote: Dont firewires run serial? If they do I dont really see how they could be any good but I dont really know. Why would that be a factor? Serial ATA is "serial", after all, and it's smokin'.
motorhead6 Posts: 193	Posted - Fri Aug 08, 2003 7:32 am  Wouldnt parralel be about 32 times faster?
motorhead6 Posts: 193	Posted - Fri Aug 08, 2003 7:36 am  Try using direct cable connection to transfer data from one computer to another sometime. If you do it parrallel it is 32 times faster than if you do it serial.
jester700 Posts: 546	Posted - Sat Aug 09, 2003 9:10 am  But you need to consider the specific interface, not whether it's "serial" or "parallel" at heart. A firewire interface IS serial, yet is about 50MB/s (though real world FW HDs get about half that). But a parallel PRINTER connection is only 50-150 kB/s! Granted, this still beats a standard serial port's speed of roughly 15kB/s, but shows that it's the specific interface that matters. Serial data at a high clock rate can easily beat parallel at a low one. WRT your file transfer scenario, even USB 1.1 is much faster than a Parallel port (and 2.0 many times faster still), which is why many people dumped their parallel ZIP drives and similar gear for USB versions. In case you didn't know, that's a Universal Serial Bus.
motorhead6 Posts: 193	Posted - Sat Aug 09, 2003 11:06 am  But serial is still a one lane highway and parralel is a 32 lane highway.
jester700 Posts: 546	Posted - Sat Aug 09, 2003 2:34 pm  motorhead6 wrote: But serial is still a one lane highway and parralel is a 32 lane highway. But a one lane highway with cars going 100mph will pass more traffic than a 32 lane highway with cars going 2mph. I don't understand the confusion here.
motorhead6 Posts: 193	Posted - Mon Aug 11, 2003 9:43 am  Well if comparing firewire to regular harddrive wouldnt we be talking about with the same computer?
jester700 Posts: 546	Posted - Mon Aug 11, 2003 10:35 am  motorhead6 wrote: Well if comparing firewire to regular harddrive wouldnt we be talking about with the same computer? Yes, but I'm not sure where you're going with this. Help?
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