The Logic Off Topic list

Mike Magee's site The Inqirer reports that IBM's Travelstar drives will be
offered at 7200 rpm next year. It could mean that forking out extra for
Firewire drives for audio could be unnecessary as internal drives --
particularly for machines which support two -- will do the job more than
adequately. 

Here's the link with a partial quote below:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6103

>IBM also announced plans for a new 7200 RPM mobile drives, offering, it said, 
>users the ability to 'cut the cord' binding them to their desks.
>
>Both the Travelstar 5400 and 7200 RPM mobile drives are expected to be 
>available in the first quarter of 2003. µ 


http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6103

Speaking of hard drives, what do you think of the new WD2000JB from 
Western Digital? It doesn't use fluid bearings yet but it's still as 
quiet as a DeskStar and the "BB" model (that has a smaller cache) 
will eventually use fluid bearings for improved acoustics though I'm 
not sure if that's really worth reducing the 8 mb buffer. Anyway the 
controversial thing about this new great drive is that while it's an 
awesome performer (56 mbytes/s sustained transfer rate!) its average 
seek time is a little high around 14 ms compared to some of the 
competition, though none of the faster-seek-time drives come close to 
its other synthetic and real world benchmark scores. Think that would 
be ok for audio with regular defragmenting etc? 

Best wishes,
Jeremy Martin; sadus@...                        
http://www.carrollsweb.com/sadus <-- music links, PC DAW parts list

At 01:36 PM 11/8/02 +0000, you wrote:
>Speaking of hard drives, what do you think of the new WD2000JB from 
>Western Digital? It doesn't use fluid bearings yet but it's still as 
>quiet as a DeskStar and the "BB" model (that has a smaller cache) 
>will eventually use fluid bearings for improved acoustics though I'm 
>not sure if that's really worth reducing the 8 mb buffer. Anyway the 
>controversial thing about this new great drive is that while it's an 
>awesome performer (56 mbytes/s sustained transfer rate!) its average 
>seek time is a little high around 14 ms compared to some of the 
>competition, though none of the faster-seek-time drives come close to 
>its other synthetic and real world benchmark scores. Think that would 
>be ok for audio with regular defragmenting etc? 

I guess so -- even 12 gig 5400 rpm drives I bought 4 years ago were pretty
capable when it came to playing back plenty of 24bit /44.1 kHz  audio
tracks. As far as audio  goes, a low seek time is pretty important for
things like streaming samples for the EXS24/Gigasampler . The highest
performance (max simultaneous voices without glitches) for Gigasampler is
obtained with 10k -- 15k SCSI drives. 

If you think how long your OS takes to load -- most of the time that the
hard-drive light is on must be drive seeks because the total MB of all
loaded files is less than a second worth of continuous read off the media. 

We might see 10,000 rpm IDE before long. I suspect that the IT slump has
delayed their release. Seagate's Barracuda ATA products are pretty similar
to the SCSI equivalent so a "Cheetah ATA" is a possibility although the
Seagate suits may worry that this sort of product would hurt their
profitable enterprise SCSI sales. The top end of SCSI has been 15,000 rpm
for a coulple of years already. 

Regards,
Murray

On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 08:36 AM, Jeremy Martin wrote:

> Speaking of hard drives, what do you think of the new WD2000JB from
> Western Digital? It doesn't use fluid bearings yet but it's still as
> quiet as a DeskStar and the "BB" model (that has a smaller cache)
> will eventually use fluid bearings for improved acoustics though I'm
> not sure if that's really worth reducing the 8 mb buffer. Anyway the
> controversial thing about this new great drive is that while it's an
> awesome performer (56 mbytes/s sustained transfer rate!) its average
> seek time is a little high around 14 ms compared to some of the
> competition, though none of the faster-seek-time drives come close to
> its other synthetic and real world benchmark scores. Think that would
> be ok for audio with regular defragmenting etc?

I have to say that I have had a WD drive fail on me after 6 months 
(shipped oem in my first g4) - so I am leery of this company. Take that 
with the usual grain of salt.

The spec sounds good - if you are playing/recording long audio files - 
if you are playing stuff that is edited - or lots of regions etc etc - 
i.e. more numerous smaller files - then I guess the seek time starts to 
become a factor.

Quiet is good but not essential. Realistically isolation is the only 
solution to noise problems for drive/fan noise - especially if they 
leak into your recording environment. So you can get away with noisier 
equipment if properly isolated from you and your mics.