Ideal audio storage options for laptop DAW?

[Alferd Packer]

Here's what I have:

Lenovo T61p Thinkpad(2.2 ghz, 3gb RAM, 160MB onboard drive)
Cardbus Firewire Adaptor(Texas Instruments chipset)
Maxtor Onetouch 500GB 7200 rpm external firewire HDD for audio tracks
Presonus Firebox

Running Cubase SX3

I am not really happy with the performance of the Maxtor at all. I am aware that there is a 2nd HDD SATA option on the thinkpad, but it is ultrabay slim and all of the drives I have seen so far have been maximum 60GB and 4200 rpm. Am I right in thinking this would be slower than the firewire option?

I have considered a cardbus eSATA adapter but I am already using my cardbus for the firewire card.

Are there any recommendations outside of what I have already mentioned? Would a better firewire drive solve all of my problems? Any recommendations for that? Would I be a lot better off scrapping the the thinkpad idea altogether and building a workstation DAW? The thinkpad is pretty beefy so I'd rather not do that if I can avoid it.

I just recently got back into DAW recording after 8 years and all this new gear hurts my brain.

[AndyH]

USB 2 and firewire are widely used for audio. Some people perfer one, some the other, but both seem to be quite successful. In what way is yours unsatisfactory?

[TimOBrien]

How do you have the Firebox and the Maxtor hooked up?

Some interfaces are not happy with daisy chaining drives (even though you should be able to do it.... I myself have a Glyph drive daisy-chained to my Motu828mkII with ZERO problems.) Check with Presonus 'cause their drivers would be the limiting problem. Maybe putting them both on a firewire hub would help.

[Alferd Packer]

I have a three port firewire card, so I'm not daisy chaining anything. I am getting audio dropouts if I start to use more than about 8 tracks.

[oretez]

well you kind of are . . . the card bus has three sockets not three discrete buses

while theoretically firewire can handle 8 I+O of 24b 44.1kHz audio OS, IRQ, hardware overhead can limit practical results

my approach was built by what worked starting back in PII usb 1.x days but typically I'll do audio A/D on the firewire, either use internal 2nd HD or route to USB 2 (as recently as last Feb. I had a problem with a Maxtor one touch that while theoretically was rated @ 7200 rpm still produced drop outs with only four simultaneous tracks . . . Even though I had suggested we record to my drives back up to his I still got to eat the session)

I have a T60 that has been my walking around laptop for about a year, recently ran into a Murphy's law glitch at a field session where the designated recording laptop simply could not be brought on line in a timely manner, had to default to the T60, it has a 2nd HD but that had not been defragged or set up for recording so I used on board USB 2 to an external HD (could not say brand, several years old and not specifically designated as 'recording' drive . . . was the B/U drive while usually recording to 2nd internal HDD) worked fine with 8 tracks 24/44.1

while there are 2.5 HDD's at least 320 gigs generally speaking everything over 80 gigs (with a few exception where the 80 gig drives have unacceptable mean failure rates) is less dependable . . .

off the top of head a 24 track 24/44.1 4 hr session (continuous) tops out @ roughly 44 gigs so I've found 80 gig drives to be quite functional and am fairly unhappy that the smaller 40's and 80's are getting harder to find and more expensive

but again basic recommendations would be to use firewire for A/D and 2nd internal HDD as recording media ('storage' is not the term I'd typically use for my work flow as unless there is some specific reason for retaining audio on the recording drive it gets moved to optical + two separate HD's before I ever start to edit and/or mix) but recording to external HD's is certainly possible (been doing it since PII 300mHz usb 1 days though not 8 tracks with that hardware)

zipzoomfly typically had good selection and acceptable prices on 2.5 drives

[Alferd Packer]

Thanks for the suggestions. As far as the 2nd internal drive goes, that's where things get confusing for me. I have found this adapter on the lenovo site:

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=38&Code=43R1980&current-category-id=2478535BAB3C417CA9D77F5867D31462

And then I saw this on EBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/2nd-second-Hard-Drive-caddy-for-IBM-T60-T61-Z60_W0QQitemZ250347720299QQihZ015QQcategoryZ74949Q QcmdZViewItem

One is $5 and one is $50.

I'm not sure of what the difference is and what a good drive to buy for either. The $5 one is compatible with drives up to 5200rpm and the $50 seems to only support very expensive ultrabay drives that only run 4200rpm. I'm completely clueless here. :(

[oretez]

first you do have to do homework and sorting out which peripherals work on which specific laptops is not an easy task (some models of some thinkpads with some power management implementations resist using aftermarket (@ half the price of IBM branded) batteries, for example)

while getting parts number that will work with thinkpads is relatively easy
here is a url that should help: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Hardware_Specifications

finding which less hardware with different IBM numbers are equivalent to more expensive items that your specific machine might call for is a bit harder

and unfortunately this is not best forum to unravel all those questions

off top of my head I'd say that either bay should work with your machine (earlier machines had a slightly different form factor and new genuine IBM/Lenovo of that item have been unavailable for about two years)

the ebay one works with the earlier 'parallel' hard drive bus, now larger being replaced by the 'serial' bus (PATA and SATA respectively)

Seagate momentus drives, in my experience, tend to be fairly reliable

a representative one can be found here: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10007081

Parallel bus drives (ATA or PATA) can still be located but I'm not sure anyone is still manufacturing new ones which more or less explains cost difference

$50 has been the Lenovo/IBM price for the device that holds the HD for ten years maybe

until recently aftermarket, new old stock, PATA holders ran about $20 . . . so my guess is the $5 dollars reflects the diminishing pool of parallel drives

close to 90% of the drives I have in constant use are still PATA, but if you are making a investment in the 'future' SATA do have greater bandwidth

and rotation of the drive has much less to do with how a drive performs for audio interactions among all the factors (on PII's laptops I used 10k SCSI drives) and for the non portable systems I used 15k drives for a number of years, but I stayed with SCSI even as it was dissappearing for reasons not particularly related to rpm and that the drives were noisey meant then by 2003 (after a move) I migrated to the IDE drives . . . but rpm is the marketing label and generally for multitracking faster is better . . . typically I don't track 24 bit to anything but 7200 rpm drives (but rpm is insufficient to guarantee high track count)

So? either container should work. they require different type of drives. all other things being equal the SATA drives will be faster

clear as mud? as they say

[Alferd Packer]

Thanks for an excellent post and some very helpful links oretez. A general sign post pointing me which way to go is all I needed. I will post when I decide what I am going to ultimately do. :)

[BB Studio Forge]

I have been through several laptops over the year and always ran a large internal Seagate with out issues , then sending product to external 7200 hard drive through FW or USB. Both worked fine. Now useing a Vista PC with 160 GB Seagate 7200 and external 1.5 TB hard drive 7200 rpm from Lacie. Only issue is drive noise higher than I like.

As my needs grew larger I finally went to Rack Mount Sonica PC with 4 HD's and they give you the choice of overclocking the CPU or the new Intel i7 chips that does not need the latency of the Front Side Bus in your audio signal. Both ideas work great, but i7 forces you to use DDR3 memory at a higher cost and new Mother Board.
Just a Thought :
Mike Bryan

[BB Studio Forge]

I have been through several laptops over the years and always ran a large internal Seagate with out issues , then sending product to external 7200 hard drive through FW or USB. Both worked fine. Now useing a Vista PC with 160 GB Seagate 7200 and external 1.5 TB hard drive 7200 rpm from Lacie. Only issue is drive noise higher than I like.

As my needs grew larger I finally went to Rack Mount Sonica PC with 4 HD's and they give you the choice of overclocking the CPU or the new Intel i7 chips that does not need the latency of the Front Side Bus in your audio signal. Both ideas work great, but i7 forces you to use DDR3 memory at a higher cost and new Mother Board.
Just a Thought :
Mike Bryan