RATOC FIREDOCK

Until now, removable hard drives have been an expensive luxury, but RATOC's Firedock brings them within the reach of almost any musician.

Many digital studios have been using removable hard drive racks for some time, so that all the data for each session can be stored on its own drive, just as people would buy reels of two-inch tape for their analogue recordings. The advantages are obvious: you can swap between projects without even rebooting the computer, move your projects to other studios with a minimum of fuss, and back them up quickly without filling your box cupboard with endless CD-Rs. Until now, however, removable drives have always been exclusively SCSI devices, since this format was necessary to achieve the access speeds demanded by video and audio applications, and these carry a much higher price tag than the ATA/IDE drives produced in higher volume for the PC market -- a 60Gb IDE drive now costs well under £200.

Now RATOC Systems, known for their networking cards as well as Firewire and SCSI interfaces, have produced a removable hard drive system which uses the cheaper ATA drives and connects to your computer via the Firewire buss. It doesn't use the Oxford W911 chipset as recommended by Digidesign for Pro Tools, but does support 100MHz buss speed and 7200rpm drives. It is compatible with PCs which have a Firewire port, and with Apple computers that have Firewire as standard; you need Windows 98 or higher or Mac OS 9.0.4 or higher, the only exception being that you can't use this unit on a blue and white G3 running OS X. My comments here are based on using a 400MHz Mac G4 with OS 9.0.4.

Firewire is Apple's proprietary name for the data-transfer protocol also known by the frankly less inspiring name of IEEE1394, and caused great excitement with its inclusion as standard on Macs, as its fast transfer speed (up to 400Mbps) enables direct transfer of digital video into the computer without the need for digitising hardware on PCI cards. We have already seen other peripherals migrating to the Firewire buss, including audio interfaces and stand-alone hard drives, and the Firedock is the logical next step. In the UK it is available in two formats, single- and double-bay external, while a single-bay internal model is also available in some territories. For this review I used the FRDK2 double-bay external drive.

The rack is housed in a traditional grey/beige case, 180x165x340mm in size (about as big as three slim hard drives on top of each other) with two lockable drawers at one end for housing drives. On the back panel are two Firewire ports, one to connect to the computer and one to chain other devices, and single IEC power inlet and outlet. Also supplied are screws to hold your drive in the caddy, keys to lock the caddies in place when you're using them, and a hybrid software CD containing Mac and Windows formatting and mounting software. A neat 20-page A5 manual, a quality braided Firewire lead and an IEC power lead complete the package. Drives are not supplied.

Each hard drive you use with the Firedock needs to be fitted into a caddy, and if you want to hot-swap between drives quickly, you'll want to buy a caddy for each drive (they cost £35.25 each) rather than replacing the drives in a single caddy.

RATOC FR DK2 Firedock £382 pros Easy and fast to back up or copy whole audio projects. Fast enough for multitrack audio recording. Huge amounts of backup or sample data on-line. Cheaper than SCSI alternatives. Less configuration problems than SCSI. cons Still more expensive than CD backup. Not yet recommended by Digidesign for Pro Tools. summary The RATOC Firedock provides a very cost-effective way of adding effectively unlimited drive capacity to Firewire-equipped computers, whether it's for multitrack audio, sample data or fast, convenient backup.

Resisting the urge to eat the enclosed silica gel (why do they put that on there?), I inserted a 60Gb IBM Deskstar, one of the recommended drives. A number of the most popular drives from Maxtor, Seagate, IBM and Quantum are listed as guaranteed to work with the Firedock. All drives should have their jumpers set to 'master': this is probably the default setting as your disk is delivered, and you don't have to worry about having one drive be a slave, as you would if both were being installed on the same IDE buss. Once the cables are plugged in, the drive fits very snugly into the caddy, hardly needing screwing in at all.

After inserting the caddy into the rack, you turn the lock switch with the key to activate the drive. The lock ensures that the caddy is fully pushed in and well connected to the bay, as well as making the power connection to the drive. It also prevents idle fingers removing a drive when in use, as long as you keep the keys out of the way! The fan is described as low-noise, but is by no means silent, and produced about about the same amount of noise as my G4 itself.

My OS 9.0.4 reported an unformatted drive and offered to format it, which worked fine. If you want to partition it, you will need to use the bundled mounter software, which as later tests showed, gave slightly better performance too. The manual helpfully tells you step-by-step how to access the Apple web site to download the latest Firewire driver, although you should already have one as part of the normal system. If you are running Mac OS X, you won't need the supplied software. Once the software is installed, you simply connect the unit and reboot.

Drive Time

Once formatted, my drive appeared on the desktop and I copied some files across. Under each key socket are two LEDs, a green one to show that the drive is activated and a red one which flashes to indicate data transfer. This flashed away reassuringly as a large chunk of backup data was successfully copied over. As with all removables, you should take care to unmount a drive and let it spin down before removing and replacing it, otherwise the CPU can get confused about which drive it actually has connected at any time. Unlike SCSI Probe and similar utilities, you can't force the mounting software to scan the Firewire buss for new drives -- it either recognises that you've attached a new drive, or it doesn't! The ability to swap drives without having to reboot your computer is, however, a great time-saver.

In performance terms, running an FWB Hard Disk Tools bench test returned a very creditable average access time of 8.4mS, with a sustained read rate of 28217Kb/sec and sustained write rate of 21629Kb/sec, figures that compared well with a similar IBM drive on the internal IDE buss. As well as using the Firedock for backup, many users will want to record multitrack audio direct to drives mounted in it, so I set out to see how many Logic audio tracks I could play back before it fell over. Using a MOTU 2408 with the buffer size set to its smallest value of 64 samples, it played 64 mono tracks without difficulty, so I did an edit across all 64 tracks to force the head to jump to a new location for each track. With the edit in place, the drive managed only 51 tracks compared to 63 when the same drive was mounted in the internal IDE buss, but increasing the buffer size to 128 samples gave back the full complement.

In conclusion, the RATOC Firedock is a brilliantly easy way to store your backups on a medium you can search with your computer's standard 'find' utility, and is fast enough to run multitrack audio directly. It appears to do the same as SCSI systems costing twice as much, and the drives are also much cheaper, making long-term storage more cost-effective too. As a backup format, it does work out a bit more expensive than CDs -- about 60p per Gigabyte more, at average media prices -- and quite a lot more than tape backup. However, it offers considerable speed and convenience advantages over both these formats.

information

FR DK1 (one-bay external) £240.92; FR DK2 (two-bay external, as reviewed) £381.88; FR MR1 hard drive caddies £35.25 each. Prices include VAT. Channel Dynamics +44 (0)870 60 70 540. +44 (0)870 60 70 541. Click here to email www.ratocsystems.com/english/index.html

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