Recording to internal drive

[airkarol]

Hey,

I will be doing an 8 channel recording this weekend with an M-Audio Firewire 1814 and a MBP. Will it be ok to record to the internal drive? I have a lacie external drive, but only one firewire port. I'm afraid that if I daisy chain them, there might be issues.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[zimv20]

daisy chain the devices. your drive will be a bottleneck long before the firewire bus.

regardless, you should be doing stress tests before the actual event to see how your system handles the different configurations. e.g., you may find that it's better to have the drive in the middle of the chain, instead of at the end.

 

[CanadaRAM]

My bias is that capturing to the internal would be better.

That's a (presumably) 5400 RPM drive on a 150 MBs buss rather than a 7200 RPM drive on a 40 MBs buss shared with the incoming digital audio stream.

The comparison here is a bit equivocal, but it does show that random writes are WAY faster on the internal drive.
http://www.barefeats.com/5472.html
and that Firewire 800 benchmarks better than FW400.

HOWEVER there is a big caveat. If your internal is already more than half full, then you are losing a significant amount of speed by using the inner tracks. In that case a less-full large capacity external may well be faster.

 

[zimv20]

That's a (presumably) 5400 RPM drive on a 150 MBs buss rather than a 7200 RPM drive on a 40 MBs buss shared with the incoming digital audio stream.

yes but...

the internal drive isn't dedicated to capturing audio, it's also running the app and the OS. if (when?) needed parts of the app and OS starting paging in and out, that drive and buss will get pretty busy.

8 channels of audio is nothing for a firewire bus.