Hi all,

I am having a few problems running Pro Tools as it halts up a bit on big sessions.

I have all my sessions on an external USB 2.0 Lacie 500gig drive. ( powered off the USB bus ) is this bad !!!!

Just been looking at possible Firewire drives that Avid/Digidesign recommend but wondering if anyone can suggest ones that they use for great performance.


I also have a Liquid Mix by Focustrite and only have 1 Firewire port on my machine.

Bugger!!

My machine is i5 4gig Ram imac

Many thanks,

Paul

To cut a long story short you need a Mac Pro. I would expect these type of issues with a large session on an iMac.

Quote thenaturallevel:

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To cut a long story short you need a Mac Pro. I would expect these type of issues with a large session on an iMac.

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I would disagree, I have an i5 iMac and it is as fast as many Mac Pro's of not too long ago. It certainly blows my old MacPro out of the water.

Quote Twigboy:

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I also have a Liquid Mix by Focustrite and only have 1 Firewire port on my machine.

Bugger!!

My machine is i5 4gig Ram imac

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One thing you should do, load up with RAM from Crucial. 16GB will set you back just £70. It's just rude not to

USB might be a big issue here. You could a) get a FireWire drive and chain your LM to it. B) Get something like a QNAS iSCSI drive and connect it via your iMac's Ethernet port. This will give you roughly the same (or even better) performance to a FireWire 800 drive.

Quote thenaturallevel:

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To cut a long story short you need a Mac Pro. I would expect these type of issues with a large session on an iMac.

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Its fine if you move the project to your internal drive. If you want to use an external drive, don't use USB 2 for anything other than backup. Firewire 800 is plenty fast enough. Thunderbolt allows you to connect multiple super speed drives and leave your firewire port for other things.

I think it depends on what you call a big session though and also what kind of things you are running in it. Also when you say it halts up, what does that mean? Is there a specific error message?

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

First choice is to use the internal HD, then back up to external.
An ethernet based network drive would be 2nd as your E-net is 1000 Mbits/s ( ie more than FW800 )
3rd would be use the FW800port with a FW800 HD first in the chain ( - and your FW400 interface looped after the drive )

I use an ethernet HD and stream true HD video to/from it - so alot more data than audio.
It works just fine.

Quote Aftertouch:

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Quote thenaturallevel:

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To cut a long story short you need a Mac Pro. I would expect these type of issues with a large session on an iMac.

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I would disagree, I have an i5 iMac and it is as fast as many Mac Pro's of not too long ago. It certainly blows my old MacPro out of the water.

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The iMac runs well with what i'm doing, have just invested in a few CPU hungry Waves plugins this is what i mean by making the Machine a bit sluggish on large Mixes in PT 9. Which i think is pretty CPU hogging anyhow.

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One thing you should do, load up with RAM from Crucial. 16GB will set you back just £70. It's just rude not to

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Think max i can instal is 8gig on mine so i'll definitely do this. Thank u.

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USB might be a big issue here. You could a) get a FireWire drive and chain your LM to it. B) Get something like a QNAS iSCSI drive and connect it via your iMac's Ethernet port. This will give you roughly the same (or even better) performance to a FireWire 800 drive.

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Is it ok to chain something as important as my drive that Pro Tools is reading/writing to/from???? Would there not be issues with having two 'realtime' processsing??

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Quote Scope:

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First choice is to use the internal HD, then back up to external.
An ethernet based network drive would be 2nd as your E-net is 1000 Mbits/s ( ie more than FW800 )
3rd would be use the FW800port with a FW800 HD first in the chain ( - and your FW400 interface looped after the drive )

I use an ethernet HD and stream true HD video to/from it - so alot more data than audio.
It works just fine.

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Pro Tools always recommend writing to a separate drive to your system drive??? If its just streaming music or playing through i tunes ect then yes the system drive is the one, not for music production, i've always been told.


So is ETHERNET better, are all drives compatible with these ports now??? Anyone had any issues with this and Pro Tools??



Thank you all for the input and advice.

Quote Will_m:

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I think it depends on what you call a big session though and also what kind of things you are running in it. Also when you say it halts up, what does that mean? Is there a specific error message?

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Sorry no error message, i have just been working with some CPU hogging Waves plugins, Melodyne, Kontact, Guitar Rig. When i think about it its doing well.

Sometimes i get a error message regarding 'not able to read from the Hard disk, possibly too defragged ect'.

Thats why i was thinking a drive with a faster bus transfer rate???

Thank u

Quote Twigboy:

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Pro Tools always recommend writing to a separate drive to your system drive???

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But we're suggesting you try it anyway! HAVE you tried?

Quote Twigboy:

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Is it ok to chain something as important as my drive that Pro Tools is reading/writing to/from???? Would there not be issues with having two 'realtime' processsing??

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Possibly but probably not. Try it on the internal drive - its really much faster than USB 2. Pro tools might recommend external drives, but that advice was probably written with SCSI and Firewire in mind rather than the slow USB2 interface.

USB2 maximum speed is about 35 MB/s, while internal 7200 drives can reach speeds of well over 100 MB/s ...

As far as I can remember the recommendation from Avid was to use separate drives, such as another internal drive, or for external esata or firewire, they even recommended a particular chipset.

I've found PT very picky over your hardware but once its set-up is pretty reliable. Of curse there are other much more friendly sequencers that will run on pretty much everything but that a different topic...

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

Hi all,

Thanks for your response.


No i've never tried writing to and reading my sessions from my system drive.

That would be saving into my Documents space???

Its not possible to fit another internal drive into the computer alongside the system drive???

Many thanks,

Twigboy

Quote Twigboy:

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Hi all,

Thanks for your response.


No i've never tried writing to and reading my sessions from my system drive.

That would be saving into my Documents space???

Its not possible to fit another internal drive into the computer alongside the system drive???

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You've absolutely convinced yourself that recording to the system drive is WRONG! However, just try it.

Yes, a folder in Documents would be a sensible place to use. But that's only a label, it doesn't correspond to any particular part of your hard drive. Anywhere will do. Just make a specific folder SOMEWHERE, rather than just chucking the files into a heap in something else's folder!

Quote Twigboy:

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Hi all,

Thanks for your response.


No i've never tried writing to and reading my sessions from my system drive.

That would be saving into my Documents space???

Its not possible to fit another internal drive into the computer alongside the system drive???

Many thanks,

Twigboy

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There's no problem with using your system drive to record onto, at all.

Quote Twigboy:

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Hi all,
Its not possible to fit another internal drive into the computer alongside the system drive??

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It is possible in some of the newer Imacs, I think 2011 onwards. You can even order them with an SSD system drive and an extra internal storage drive.

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

Edited by Will_m (28/02/12 11:43 AM)

Quote Aftertouch:

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One thing you should do, load up with RAM from Crucial. 16GB will set you back just £70. It's just rude not to

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Quote Twigboy:

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Think max i can instal is 8gig on mine so i'll definitely do this. Thank u.

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Actually, you have the same model as me and it will happily accept 32GB of RAM! My 2011 i5 now has 12GB RAM (2x 2GB original Apple & 2x 4GB Crucial RAM), with 8GB more Crucial RAM waiting on the side to replace the Apple RAM. Once done, I'll have 16GB in total.

The entry-level 2011 i5 iMac was only configurable with a maximum of 8GB on the Apple website. However, it has four memory slots, each can support an 8GB module.

Quote EveryMac:

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By default, 4 GB of RAM is installed as two 2 GB SO-DIMM modules. Two slots free.

*Officially, this model supports four 4 GB modules -- one in each slot for a maximum of 16 GB of memory. However, third-parties have discovered that it actually will support 32 GB of memory using four 8 GB modules.

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More info here...

Quote Scope:

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I use an ethernet HD and stream true HD video to/from it - so alot more data than audio.
It works just fine.

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CAN I ASK WHICH DRIVE YOU USE PLEASE?

Any SATA drive will do, just don't use USB - its crap.
I stream broadcast quality HD from a FW800 and occasionally from a ethernet HD.
On my Macbook Pro, I use the factory fitted 5400 rpm internal drive which does a reasonable job thankyou !

Re iMacs with 2nd drives - only if you remove the optical drive.
Then you get an optical-drive-bay caddy and hopefully a nice fast laptop-size SSD
There is no other space inside the case that I know of ( and I have taken a few apart for servicing / cleaning etc )

If you want lots of drives, you need a Mac Pro or an ethernet raid solution.
For any other Mac, Thunderbolt looks like the best way to go, if you can find a thunderbolt HD.

Quote Scope:

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Re iMacs with 2nd drives - only if you remove the optical drive.
Then you get an optical-drive-bay caddy and hopefully a nice fast laptop-size SSD
There is no other space inside the case that I know of ( and I have taken a few apart for servicing / cleaning etc )

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A quick trip to the Applestore will reveal that's hasn't been true for a long time. I use a 27" iMac with SSD system drive and an internal 2Tb SATA drive, and an optical drive as usual on the right hand side. Never has ANY problem with speed no matter how much I run. And it's all in one box.

Back-ups are obviously external, but otherwise this is pretty much a perfect system for value, screen size and multiple drives. In the past I've used Mac Pro towers, Macbook Pros with and without external monitors, and even a BBC micro - some time ago now - the fully loaded big iMac is by far the fastest and best, ever.

Quote Iain Boyd:

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A quick trip to the Applestore will reveal that's hasn't been true for a long time. I use a 27" iMac with SSD system drive and an internal 2Tb SATA drive, and an optical drive as usual on the right hand side. Never has ANY problem with speed no matter how much I run. And it's all in one box.

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Is this true of the 21" too?

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com