EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

At 01:52 PM 01/07/2004, Nick Batzdorf wrote:


>Anyway, the important question is how many voices you can get through
>Firewire 400's bandwidth, and I believe the practical limit is 350 -
>400 mono voices. My understanding is that the drive's transfer rate
>isn't so important; it's the seek time that makes the difference.
>That's why the Western Digital Raptor 10K RPM SATA drives
>(approaching $300 for a 72GB drive) are best for maxing out the
>number of voices, even though you can't use the throughput.

Ah, good to know.  I hadn't ever heard drive performances expressed in 
terms of voices---maybe we could get the manufacturers to add that to their 
specs!  Is there any advantage to mounting an SATA drive in a FireWire 
enclosure, as opposed to a standard ATA drive? Is it that the newer SATA 
drives have consistently faster seek times than their older counterparts?


>On the Vienna Symphonic Library forum, their resident computer guru
>CM recommends using two 160GB drives for their roughly 230GB library.
>You can fit it on one 250GB drive, but the drive is going to be too
>full, and that will hurt its performance. He also says that drives
>with 2MB buffers seem to be more responsive, but that may have been
>an anecdotal off-cuff comment.

I assume he's talking about external FireWire drives? Has he made any 
comments about FW 400 vs. FW 800? (I don't frequent that forum since I 
can't justify the cost of that library to my wife!)