taylormadeaudio Posted July 14, 2012 Report Share Posted July 14, 2012 I recently ordered a couple external drives, and though I usually get 7200rpm drives, I accidentally wound up with these 5400rpm units... anyone have any experience with these? I'm running Metacorder (max 10 trks) BW-poly at 24/48/23.98 and a 702T backup (2 trks, same specs.) Will the 5400rpm drives suffice for either or both systems, or should I keep them boxed up and return them for 7200's? Thanks for any advice : ) ~tt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jesse Flaitz Posted July 14, 2012 Report Share Posted July 14, 2012 I don't have experience using 5400rpm drives in that context, but I have 2 2tb 5400rpm drives set up in Raid 1 as backup drives for projects/back up files, and another one as a media storage drive for videos/TV shows. I can stream 1080 video from them no problem. I can write to my Raid 1 5400rpm at about 1gb/min via USB2. I hope that helped. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
taylormadeaudio Posted July 14, 2012 Author Report Share Posted July 14, 2012 Thanks man, I guess I'll just run a few tests tomorrow & see what happens. Worst case scenario, I have more storage space. ~tt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Wielage Posted July 14, 2012 Report Share Posted July 14, 2012 Makes no difference for audio, unless your track counts go very high. I've run well over 50 tracks with a 5400RPM drive on Pro Tools with no problem. Many, many laptops have dinky 5400RPM drives, and I've run Metacorder many times with about a dozen tracks and never had a hiccup. It is a problem with uncompressed HD video, in some cases, creating dropped frames, glitches, and so on with Final Cut Pro or Avid (assuming Mac OSX). But it depends on codecs, software, processor speed, and other factors. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonG Posted July 14, 2012 Report Share Posted July 14, 2012 Pro-Tools recommends 7200, not 5400. Ive tried recording 8 tracks on a 5400 drive, and it started crapping out about four minutes in. Four tracks worked well for about an hour and a half session with no problems. I would try to return them if possible for piece of mind if nothing else. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
taylormadeaudio Posted July 14, 2012 Author Report Share Posted July 14, 2012 Thanks guys, I remember when I first started recording (live) to HD's, I wound up going with the 7200's based on the "evidence" available at the time...it seemed very clear that those were the drives I should be using. So it's interesting to hear such a broad range of responses (granted there have only been 3?)... but I'm curious about some of the more specific parameters involving each situation described above (machine/ OS/ memory/ sample & bit rates/ track count/ duration/ which machine was timecode master if multiple machines...) I've got one person telling me no problem at all, and another telling me no way, send 'em back... so, what are the differences? (if you guys don't mind elaborating?). For instance, right off the bat, I notice we're comparing Metacorder to ProTools... one is a huge pig of a program with layer after sub-layer of code and plug-ins designed to make it do everything but brush your teeth for you in the morning... the other is more streamlined (more stable) application designed specifically for film/TV sound acquisition with one interface, no pull-down menus... At higher track counts, could this be the difference (when it comes to processing and HD speed, etc?) @ 24B/48kHz/23.98/10-trk maximum: I'm using Metacorder 1.75 on a MacMini (older 1.66 Intel Core Duo / 667 MHz bus speed... running 10.4.11 / 2 GB SDRAM). I've always used the 7200rpm 1394B (FW800) drives, but the only FW port on the Mini is 1394A (FW400)... I also have a 3.06 MHz Core Duo MBP for backup, running 10.6.8, (8 GB / 1.07 GHz DDR3) but will keep using the MacMini for as long as it works (going on like 6 or 7 years now?) If it ain't broken, don't fix it, right? I guess I'll just try the 5400rpm out and see if I can bog it down and make it crash... report to follow (at some point... starting a 4-wk gig on Monday) Thanks again for any input here -- much appreciated : ) ~tt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studiomprd Posted July 16, 2012 Report Share Posted July 16, 2012 " I've got one person telling me no problem at all, and another telling me no way, send 'em back... " once more: it depends... In general, faster is better as this also involves the OS (any of them!) running, as well as the programs (applications and/or processes), etc. Fragmentation can easily become an issue, as well, and this also happens on Mac OS!... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johnny Karlsson Posted July 16, 2012 Report Share Posted July 16, 2012 10 tracks should be fine with either drive, but I would still return them and get the 7200 RPM version. I imagine the difference in cost is negligible. Since we're talking about an external drive, it only reads / writes the audio files, so the OS and software are actually not running off of this drive. Therefore there's no difference between PT and Metacorder regardless of plug-ins, size of software etc. Other things to consider are the cache size of the drive itself, as well as read/write speed. Your Mac mini should be fine recording 10 tracks, but 2 GB of RAM is low by todays standards. 4 GB would give me better peace of mind (if it's possible to upgrade the mini?). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studiomprd Posted July 16, 2012 Report Share Posted July 16, 2012 " 4 GB would give me better peace of mind " more memory is always a good thing. depending (!) on exactly what is going on, when there is not enough memory, the OS starts swapping parts of itself back and forth to its operating drive, and these swaps may affect the systems throughput, so a high speed drive for the OS is also important, Think of it this way: when you see the little drive light, it means that something is waiting for a disc operation to finish before proceeding... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wandering Ear Posted July 16, 2012 Report Share Posted July 16, 2012 10 tracks at 48/24 will need to write about 1.4mb/s. Modern 5400 rpm drives have average sustained write speeds around 50-60mb/s. Of course this doesn't take everything else into consideration, but the drive speed alone won't kill you. Put a 10,000 rpm drive on usb 1.0 and you won't get very far. In a good enclosure with a reliable chipset on fw400 and plenty of free space, you should be fine. Obviously ymmv. One thing to remember, drive performance dramatically decreases as the drive fills up. This can be less than 50% of full performance on a full drive. K Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johnny Karlsson Posted July 16, 2012 Report Share Posted July 16, 2012 more memory is always a good thing. yup, the current version of Mac OSX is using more than 1.6 GB RAM right after boot up, with no programs running (except for Activity Monitor, which is using around 80MB). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Philip Perkins Posted July 16, 2012 Report Share Posted July 16, 2012 Most of my record drives are 5400. 24 tracks 24/48 on a JoeCo on USB2, no problem. Ditto on RME and MOTU interfaces w/ BR and MC. 5400 is usually fine for straight recording--the faster speed drives come into play when you are playing back a session with high edit-density and clips derived from a large number of different master clips (a normal movie, in other words). Test your own particular system, w/ all the tracks in record and being fed different audio so the computer has to do the work of making the display of the diff tracks as well. phil p Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OmahaAudio Posted July 16, 2012 Report Share Posted July 16, 2012 I've been buying 7200RPM drives (both internal and external) for many years because there's never really been that much of a price difference between the two and the extra 1800RPM has got to be better. What's more important is the size of the cache as a 32Mb cache will give you a performance boost over an 8Mb cache. A better controller chip set helps too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Philip Perkins Posted July 17, 2012 Report Share Posted July 17, 2012 The chip sets have been the same in the 5400s I've used. 7200 drives are noisier, hotter and take more power (re a battery operated rig). The extra rotational speed isn't really helping you at all for straight recording (not recording and playing back an edited project). It doesn't really matter either way, and if you want to use your record drives for an edit+mix project then 7200s are good phil p Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wandering Ear Posted July 17, 2012 Report Share Posted July 17, 2012 5400 rpm drives spin down faster too making them less prone to damage when shutting down and moving quickly. Probably will never matter, I'm just remembering working with 10,000 rpm drives and having to wait for them to spin down before removing them from their bays. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Wielage Posted July 17, 2012 Report Share Posted July 17, 2012 Glyph has some interesting tests on track counts, USB vs. Firewire, 5400 vs. 7200RPM, and so on: http://www.glyphtech.com/support/trackcount.php#3 They're claiming they could hit 56 tracks with no problem, even 36 tracks with numerous edits. My preference would be for an Enterprise-class 7200RPM heavy-duty drive, and not a "Green" drive that spins down -- but note the Enterprise drives cost about 3 times more than the stock hard drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
taylormadeaudio Posted July 18, 2012 Author Report Share Posted July 18, 2012 Thanks for all the great responses. As usual, so much information here! Love this forum! ~tt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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