"Zigakly" wrote in message
...


Audio doesn't use much throughput, it's access speed that is most
critical,
which has (almost) nothing to do with the interface. Firewire 400 can
manage 50MB/s, or about 600 channels at 16/44.1. Even if you could
saturate
the FW400 bus, it would be better to add another FW400 channel rather than
upgrade to FW800. Frankly an archaic EIDE interface (8.8MB max) will work
as well as SATA for most audio applications.

Thanks for the info. So my Lacie, which apparently has some kind of internal
RAID configuration (I'm not sure which type) would yield better performance
over my internal IDE Western Digital Caviar despite the interface, and use
less CPU power, then?


Firewire has advantages over USB 2 since Firewire is self-governing (like
SCSI), where USB requires the CPU to babysit (same with all IDE
derivatives). USB can clog up well before its bandwidth is maxed out
since
the CPU has to govern both the interface and the IDE drive, and with the
multitude of frequent read/write changes between audio files it's not a
good
idea.

And 32-bit floating-point processing is within the CPU, nothing to do with
the hard drives.

Actually, I think Cubase writes 32-bit WAV files by default. Or something to
that effect. Winamp and the standard consumer audio players have trouble
playing them sometimes, anyway.

It seems to me that for multitrack applications, it would be a good idea to
record half the audio files to one disk and half to another, to avoid so
much seeking between tracks. Is there a configuration, RAID or otherwise,
that would allow you to do this? From what I gather, RAID-0 would still
require each drive to look for every simoultaneously playing file, even if
for only half as much of it. The poor man's solution, I suppose, would be
simply to transfer half the tracks to another drive and hope for the best?

Thanks

TJ