03-15-2008, 09:23 PM

Hey,

I am in the process of buying a new Macbook 2.4ghz duo core with 2gb ram, 5400rpm drive, with Mac OSX Leopard. My audio recording interfaces are 2 Presonus Firepods chained together, using Firewire 400. I want the absolute best combination of gear I own, which I'm thinking is having one internal drive, one external drive. I am multitracking up to 16 channels with small latency (hopefully 3 ms) for real-time monitoring, and live recording of these tracks to some HD.

Internal options:
-Pre-existing Apple SATA 150 5400rpm drive (160gb)
-Seagate Momentus SATA 150 7200.1 7200rpm drive (100gb)

External options:
-my old Toshiba IDE/100 4800rpm drive (100gb) using USB enclosure
-my old Seagate Momentus IDE/100 7200rpm drive (100gb) using USB encl.
-possible 4gb Flash/thumb USB drive

I am thinking of having one HD for the OS, and one for the real-time saving of audio tracks. I'm not sure whether this is alright, I guess I could still have the OS on the same drive as the audio saving, but I heard this isn't the best route. This leads me to my next question, whichever combination above is the best config, where should I put the OS? Internal or external?

I have worked out that by these options/combos above, I can have roughly 14 different configurations....I'm just not sure which combo to pick because of some finer details such as streamlining and stability for the audio. I'm also probably going to use some of the audio programs in WinXP SOMETIMES so I will need Bootstrap or Parallels,etc. instaled in a partition there somewhere!

Any insight/comments/solutions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Paul

03-15-2008, 09:41 PM

Honestly, the best situation would be a desktop with two internal HDs.

Barring that, if you're going to use an external, make it a FireWire 800 external, or at least a FireWire 400 external. USB is just not designed for sustained transfers; it's not suitable for recording.

03-16-2008, 12:18 AM

Agreed, USB transfer rates just vary too much for on-the-fly recording...you risk some serious audio flaws if the transfer rate dips down.

Since you are using a MacBook, the only option you have aside from USB is FireWire 400. If you were to upgrade to a MacBook Pro, you have the option of using FireWire 800 or even buying an eSATA card for the ExpressCard slot and using an eSATA external drive...it'd write just as quickly as the internal drive.

03-16-2008, 05:30 PM

Thanks for all your help!

I was looking into buying the Macbook, but it looks like I will get the Macbook Pro. I AM looking for performance, and I guess I could scrap the idea of using my old HDs and just get the eSATA expansion and get a 500gb 7200rpm external drive. That way I don't need to upgrade the internal hard drive, and still multitrack record.

Now the question is: Since I'm daisy-chaining two Firepods into the FW 400 slot for 16 tracks (built for FW400), if I get an adapter from 400->800 does that allow the FW 400 devices to 'breathe' a bit more on the 800 port?

The specs are still the same from the Macbook I was looking at to the one I should be getting, but it has that expresscard 34 slot AND the FW800 port too....those will be nice to have if I eventually get a FW800 compatible audio interface, and want to expand and have a fast ext. HD.

thanks again,

Paul