EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

At 03:00 PM 01/06/2004, you wrote:


> >  >  >Storing samples on a dedicated drive will _not_ introduce a
> >  >>performance hit.
>
>Sean McCoy wrote:
>
> >  >True, unless the dedicated drive is an external drive with a 
> potential USB
> >>or FireWire bottleneck in comparison to the generally faster internal
> >>drives. With USB 2.0 and FireWire 800, this should be a non-issue.
>
>From: Hendrik Jan Veenstra <h@...>
>
> >Yeah, hello... of course if your 2nd drive is slower than your
> >internal drive, then you'll experience a performance hit when using
> >the 2nd drive.  LOL... :-)
>
>Just to nitpick and be really obnoxious, Firewire shouldn't normally
>cause a bottleneck, and the internal drives are the same things you
>put in FW cases. The exception is the SATA drives on G5s.

Not obnoxious at all---to the contrary, this is interesting. I'm not a 
qualified tech-head, but to my understanding the latest Ultra ATA drives 
are capable of transfer rates up to 150 MBytes per second or faster over 
the IDE bus, while the Oxford FireWire 400 bridge passes no more than 50 
MBytes per second no matter what drive is mounted in the FW case. The FW 
800 spec doubles that to 100 MBytes/s, so even that is substantially less 
than a fast drive's potential. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

As the pace of disk speed increases has been outpacing our need for speed 
over the past couple of years, we haven't had to worry about it too much, 
and these numbers are plenty high enough to sustain all but the most 
demanding high definition audio streams. But now that we're adding the 
potentially tremendous disk-streaming demands of huge 24 bit sample 
libraries (VSL, anyone?), disk throughput capabilities are again becoming 
an issue.