EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

I 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.

I should add that this is very approximate, and in fact it may be 
optimistic. When I got about 180 stereo voices on a FW drive, someone 
mentioned to me that I may not be noticing dropped voices. That's 
possible.

>  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.

From: Sean McCoy <osr@...>

>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?

I don't think you can mount them in FW enclosures. They have 
different connectors.

>  Is it that the newer SATA
>drives have consistently faster seek times than their older counterparts?

Unless something else has come out in the past couple of weeks, the 
Western Digital Raptors are the only 10K RPM drives. They have a 
faster seek time than the other SATA drives, which are all max 7200 
RPM. The drawback is that there are only two Raptors: a 36 GB one and 
a 72 GB one. SATA is only one drive per bus.

>  >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?

FireWire drives are IDE drives in FW enclosures. The drive performs 
the same either way; the difference is the bandwidth.

I think if all things are equal, you're better off mounting the 
drives internally. But they're not always equal, because there's a 
limit to the number of drives you can mount internally.

>  Has he made any
>comments about FW 400 vs. FW 800?

Not that I know of. But remember, the bus has no effect on how 
quickly the drive can read data off its platter.

>  (I don't frequent that forum since I
>can't justify the cost of that library to my wife!)

Did you know that they have a $1000 (list price) orchestra now? It's 
called Opus.

-- 

Nick Batzdorf
818/905-9101, cell 590-9101, fax 905-5434