eSATA/Firewire/USB - External HD Speed Question.

[nathanknight]

I know this thread is over a year old, but it is exactly the information I have been looking for!

I recently added a laptop to my audio studio setup. I use a desktop for my main audio recording, but I want to be able to take the laptop with me on the go to continue work while away from the studio. I have opted to ditch my internal HDs in the desktop computer and use 2 external drives that I could switch from the desktop to the laptop. After reading up on the subject I feel that eSATA is the best option for these audio drives as it appears to potentially be the fastest throughput option.

My question is: Would I get better performance if I made one drive eSATA and the other drive FireWire, instead of using a 2-port eSATA ExpressCard and having both HDs eSATA? Would the bandwidth be divided up better that way? Since I'll be using several USB devices at the same time, including an audio interface, I'd rather not have any USB HDs.

If the answer is that it will make no difference with 7200rpm drives to have 2 eSATA on the laptop, I suppose I'd need to buy an additional internal eSATA card for the desktop as the motherboard only has one onboard eSATA controller. If the answer is that it will be better to split it up and have 1 eSATA and 1 FW for better performance, I'd need to buy an additional FW controller for the desktop, as my main audio interface is a FW interface.

Any suggestions or other ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your help!

 

[sushi]

When I was considering an external FW or eSATA hard drive, one big difference was that I could get an external FW drive that could be powered by the FW bus and did not need an external power supply, unlike eSATA.

For me, the ability to carry a small external FW drive and connect it via FW800 with a short cable without a power supply for the external HD was very convenient.

 

[nathanknight]

I have a few more decisions to make regarding external peripherals. In order to help make sense of everything I'm trying to do, I made an image of all my main studio hardware and mapped it out so I could see what would be the best way to connect everything. Bare with me here and check these images out.

This first picture is of my main current equipment (minus outboard gear/processors, mics, etc) and how it is connected to my DAW (minus the external HDs, which I haven't decided on yet):
http://nathanknight.com/daw_only.jpg

This next picture includes the new laptop and how I'd like to use it to augment the desktop DAW using FXTeleport for some extra muscle power for VSTis, etc:
http://nathanknight.com/daw_with_laptop.jpg

This picture is of the laptop only and all the peripherals I'd take with me when away from the studio:
http://nathanknight.com/laptop_mobile.jpg

Now I need to decide what type of HDs to get...that can be moved from the desktop DAW to the laptop and taken with me while I travel. I'm not sure if 2 eSATA drives would be the best (fastest), or if 1 eSATA and one FW drive would be better/easier. If I go with 2 eSATA HDs, I'll need to buy a PCI eSATA card for the desktop, as all the motherboards I have seen only have 1 eSATA controller. Either way I'll need an eSATA ExpressCard for the laptop (whether a single or 2-port).

Another thing that started running through my head today as I worked on these diagrams is that since my laptop has a 200GB 7200rpm HD, would that be good enough to depend on as 1 of my "audio drives"? If my main audio HD in the desktop DAW was stationary (instead of an external eSATA that I'd take with me while traveling) and each time I traveled I burned a CD of the project(s) I wanted to take with me for further work on the laptop, and instead of taking 2 external HDs, I only took a single one (sample data HD), would the laptop's internal HD be able to handle the load of the multi-track projects as good as if I were to use a dedicated external HD?

The next thing I'm trying to figure out is a docking station. I seriously doubt that the docking stations that offer multiple video displays could come close to the quality of a Dual Head2Go, am I right? So apart from plugging the multimedia speakers into the headphone jack, it seems USB peripherals (keyboard/mouse) would be the only things that would benefit from a docking station. Unless I buy an IBM docking station (for several hundred dollars) that has power options as well. I'd appreciate some in put on this. If I use a USB keyboard/mouse and the USB XioSynth...would the XioSynth (which is my audio interface) suffer bandwidth problems is I had all 3 USB devices plugged into a USB hub/extender?

Lastly, here's a picture of all the equipment put together, with routing:
http://nathanknight.com/everything.jpg

And here are a few pics of my studio I just took:
http://nathanknight.com/studio.jpg
http://nathanknight.com/studio3.jpg
http://nathanknight.com/studio2.jpg

Thank you,
Nathan