Network hard drive for recording?

[ctmsound]

I run a macbook pro. Interface is firewire (24 CH IO), the express card slot has a UAD2, which leaves me with USB for hard drive interface. Anyone ever use a network hard drive attached to the LAN port as your recording drive? Like this?

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10007

I'm using USB currently, but have had issues with throughput. Even with Glyph drives. Any opinions? Like these?

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10007

[Nick Sevilla]

Hi,

Ethernet drives are not very good at recording and playback of audio.

It is simply not fast enough nor "robust" enough to do the sustained data transfers necessary for this task.

USB is also not so good at it. You can use it for low track counts, but as soon as you multitrack a complex session, it falls apart. Again it has to do with the drivers and how they talk between the computer and the drive itself.

On your audio interface, which is Firewire, is there a second connector on it? You could hang a FireWire drive off there with no problems, or if not, use a hard drive that has two FW connections, and hang the audio interface off the hard drive.
This has worked for many many people without issue for years.

Cheers

[casey campbell]

I run a macbook pro. Interface is firewire (24 CH IO), the express card slot has a UAD2, which leaves me with USB for hard drive interface. Anyone ever use a network hard drive attached to the LAN port as your recording drive? Like this?

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10007

I'm using USB currently, but have had issues with throughput. Even with Glyph drives. Any opinions? Like these?

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10007

yeah, audio in real time over lan is not a good idea...although networking a mix machine and an editing station is killer beans. you can be tracking and mixing, and at the same time someone can be in an editing room fixing stuff as you go.

im not saying anything new here...i need some sleep.

[calaverasgrandes]

In theory this should work. If you have a nice fast raid array sitting on a terabyte or more of storage and connected via gigabit (if your mac pro has gigabit) you should get plenty of throughput. However the TCP/IP stack introduces latency on both ends, as will any intermediate switches or routers. This is something I have actually always wanted to look deeper into. I work with some IT guys that are also musicians so maybe I can hit them up for a solution or workaround. I think maybe there might be a way to set up an IPX SPX connection or something of that ilk from the mac side. Macs are multi-homing, bridging and can even be configured as a router on a stick if you so desire. What this means is that you can configure your macs single ethernet jack to respond to multiple IP addresses and protocols. Some protocols have less overhead than TCP/IP, however that overhead is what makes TCPIP do what it does as well as it does.
There is a plug in out there that allows you to sling audio over the network to other boxes to act as FX hosts. I am not sure if there is a Mac version or if it would even be applicable. Heck I dont even recall the name.

[casey campbell]

In theory this should work. If you have a nice fast raid array sitting on a terabyte or more of storage and connected via gigabit (if your mac pro has gigabit) you should get plenty of throughput. However the TCP/IP stack introduces latency on both ends, as will any intermediate switches or routers. This is something I have actually always wanted to look deeper into. I work with some IT guys that are also musicians so maybe I can hit them up for a solution or workaround. I think maybe there might be a way to set up an IPX SPX connection or something of that ilk from the mac side. Macs are multi-homing, bridging and can even be configured as a router on a stick if you so desire. What this means is that you can configure your macs single ethernet jack to respond to multiple IP addresses and protocols. Some protocols have less overhead than TCP/IP, however that overhead is what makes TCPIP do what it does as well as it does.
There is a plug in out there that allows you to sling audio over the network to other boxes to act as FX hosts. I am not sure if there is a Mac version or if it would even be applicable. Heck I dont even recall the name.

you have some good thoughts here. if the person only has pc, they could build there own router with smooth wall, or pfsense, etc....and with alot of ram, could overbuild it for alot of speed....

[calaverasgrandes]

Well talking to the server operations guy who runs our network stuff he seems tothink its a crazy idea. But then he also admits he has never recorded m,ore than 2 tracks into his PT set up.
The solution would likely be to use a direct connection from the Mac to the network drive and eliminate every single thing that can possibly try to talk on the network interface. That would require a fair amount of hacking on a Mac as it is a bit more difficult to turn processes off in a Mac than it is on a PC. Part of why Macs are more stable right?
In a related tangent we got into talking about the MAc SD slot. He claims that they dont work in any Mac Pro he has seen when it comes to SDHC 5,6 and 10 and large capacity cards. Anyone got any experience on those? I am looking at buying a Macbook pro in the near future so this would be good to know.

[ctmsound]

Cool cool. I setup my system as FW800 to drive (FW800), then to the sound card adapting to FW400 and all seems fine. I'm just curious how the system will handle 24 or even 32 channels of input with the same drive on the firewire cable. Since it's 800 from the mac to the drive, the throughput should be no problem. I"ll test it out and see how it goes.

thanks guys.

[calaverasgrandes]

I may be wrong about this, and often am, but I am pretty sure that if its got a firewire 400 device anywhere in the chain it will default to that speed for the rest of the data buss. I have a bunch of firewire cables and adapters and junk here at work so I might have to test that out.
I really wish Apple would go back to having multiple firewire ports on the Macbook Pros. The one I have at my desk here at work is both FW400 and FW800, 2 USB and expresscard. Too bad its a 3 year old machine with max 4 gigs of DDR666 and a 2ghz CPU!

[ctmsound]

http://8help.osu.edu/1249.html

The 800 speed is not diminished. Regardless, gonna do some stress testing this weekend, make sure it's working right.

[exalted wombat]

How's performance if you record to the internal drive? Forget the numbers, just give it a try. Maybe you've got enough internal space for tracking, dump all but the current project to an external drive for storage.

You can't expect miracles from a laptop computer.