CubaseRox said:
You dont have to build a whole SCSI system to record audio, that would be plain dumb! You only need a drive to handle the recorded audio, thats all!!
You dont need a SCSI burner unless you have a few of them burning multiple disks at once. And you really dont even need that. IDE burners are fine too.
Are you crazy? Spend a few grand? You need to do some research my friend.
I just helped my friend put a SCSI setup in his computer. He has (the same as me) an Adaptec ultra160 controller card and a 17GB seagate ultra160 Hard Disc. It only cost him around $200 brand new, for the whole set-up and it works perfectly.
What were you recording a whole symphony orchestra?
Who the hell uses 70 tracks?
If you did have "70 tracks" I seriously doubt they were ALL playing at the exact same time or your drive would of froze.
Later!
first, the major benefit of scsi is its speed. you can get WD serial ata raptor drives that spin at 10k rpm and have an average seek time of 4.5 ms which is about that of scsi. and at half the price. most new motherboards support at least 2 sata drives. you could run two raptors in raid 0 if you really needed the speed.
second, the reason to go all scsi is the protocol itself. scsi allows for disk multitasking. meaning that your os drive can seek while your audio drive writes, with no interruptions. ide protocol does not allow multitasking. so when the IDE drive seeks, the rest of the system slows down while the seek is made. that defeats the point of scsi. one of the reasons that it has been a staple in the recording industry so long is due to the fact that is can multitask.
as for price a good scsi system, even without going all scsi will cost you. the card itself will run a couple hundred bucks. a good scsi drive with a decent size will run you about 5 hundred (74 gig cheetah). sorry boss, but 17 gigs doesnt hold a lot of audio. the studio where i used to staff used 36 gig drives and almost ALL of the sessions would have to have several drives around because the 36 gig drives couldnt hold an albums worth of music. ALSO, scsi drives produce more heat than standard ide drives. this is one of the reasons most studios have their drives in an external chassis. a good single bay chassis will run you close to a grand, plus you gotta buy the caddy to put the drive in. then you gotta buy cabling and terminators. easily in the thousands.
im not sayin that scsi isnt a valid option. my point is, if you are gonna spend the money on scsi, then do it right or you wont reap the full benefits of a scsi system.
plus the scsi card will sit on your pci bus. hogging the same bandwidth that your audio card is using. and if you have a PCI card like the UAD for fx, or a firewire card on the bus that is a recipe for trouble. keep as much off of that PCI bus as possible.
as for my track count, it was a LARGE pop session with real drums, programmed drums, loops, synths, bass, synth bass, guitars, and stacks and stacks of vocals. you are correct about not having all 70 tracks playin the whole time, BUT the fact that most of these files were accessed at different times on the same drive while about 20 of the tracks played all the way through speaks of IDE drives capabilities. especially since the drums (16 tracks) had 4600 edits across them all with crossfades.