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New Imac - 1 firewire port

A

andy5000

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 17, 2006
185
0
Hi,
I have a macbook pro 2.16ghz, so its getting to become a bit slow.
I have been waiting to upgrade since november, but wanted the latest revision.
My concern is i have a focusrite saffire 26i/o and 2 lacie d2s. i like the lacies running off firewire 800 which is why i bought a express card for my mbp.
Will 1 firewire 800 be able to cope with the bandwidth of 2 hard drives and the focusrite?or will i have to go for the mac pro:S.
The main use of the machine is web design but i also do a fair chunk of audio stuff in logic, including recording 16 channels simultaneously.
Thanks for the help\
Andrew
 
yeh i understand its meant to but when i tried it on my mbp it kept dropping out, and when it was happening to my hard drives i wasnt to chuffed but having said that was when i tried it with the built in fw400. are you using a similar setup?
 
andy5000 said:
Hi,
I have a macbook pro 2.16ghz, so its getting to become a bit slow.
I have been waiting to upgrade since november, but wanted the latest revision.
My concern is i have a focusrite saffire 26i/o and 2 lacie d2s. i like the lacies running off firewire 800 which is why i bought a express card for my mbp.
Will 1 firewire 800 be able to cope with the bandwidth of 2 hard drives and the focusrite?or will i have to go for the mac pro:S.
The main use of the machine is web design but i also do a fair chunk of audio stuff in logic, including recording 16 channels simultaneously.
Thanks for the help\
Andrew
Click to expand...

Let's see... FW800 is 800,000,000 bits per second or 100 megabytes per second.

Audio at 96K and 24-bits is about 1.5 megabytes per second. My guess is that you are right at the breaking point and could justify a Mac Pro. Those bits go on the FW800 bus twice. Once from the audio interface to the computerthan back out on the FW800 bus to the disk. 32 times for 16 channels. This uses about 1/2 the total bandwidth of the fw800. I don't like to see 50% usage on day one. Not much "headroom" left

But then if you record at 44.1K that would make a huge difference.

I have two 1.5TB drives daisy-chained through FW800 in my office, the only slowdown I see is when I have to wake the drives from their sleep mode.
Click to expand...

But do you also have a 24 track audio interface running on the same FW800 bus? With office wrk you would never notice a millisecond but with audio you do notice every dropout
 
! Firewire port

I agree with your concern. I just bought the new one FW 800 macbook pro, and thought maybe Mac knew something I did not, but so far no one has hooked a Firewire Audio interface with a firewire external hard drive with success . I had a g4 macbook pro ,and never had a problem with my firewire 400, and 800 ports! I can run both my music programs on the hard drives play, and record on the audio, and NEVER have a problem. I have tried on my new macbook pro dasiy chain. then a hub with my audio, and hard drive, and I loose my audio. This is not a good thing when you are trying to make music. I have not even got to recording! It has been 4 months of trying diffrent ways. I am convinced it can not be done. Some say go ubs, but if any one knows anything about usb audio it is not up to par with the firewire audio. Why would you get a new mac to go backwards with your creativity!

It looks like the answer will be getting a mac pro tower!
 
ChrisA said:
Let's see... FW800 is 800,000,000 bits per second or 100 megabytes per second.

Audio at 96K and 24-bits is about 1.5 megabytes per second. My guess is that you are right at the breaking point and could justify a Mac Pro. Those bits go on the FW800 bus twice. Once from the audio interface to the computerthan back out on the FW800 bus to the disk. 32 times for 16 channels. This uses about 1/2 the total bandwidth of the fw800. I don't like to see 50% usage on day one. Not much "headroom" left

But then if you record at 44.1K that would make a huge difference.



But do you also have a 24 track audio interface running on the same FW800 bus? With office wrk you would never notice a millisecond but with audio you do notice every dropout
Click to expand...

Chris A Have you ever fixed your firewire problem?
 
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