Hard drive setup
By DavidFisher. Filed in technology |Tags: D2, firewire, hard drive, Lacie, Macbook Pro, mackie 400f, rack
A reader named Pat posted
“Loved your review, excellent insight into the ins and outs of the new MBP. I wanted to know a little bit more about your external hard drive configuration… you say you have four attached, does that mean that you have an additional powered USB hub attached? And how are the load times for your External HDs, are you waiting for them to wind up before the system loads their content, or are you keeping them busy and constantly whirring, haha.”
So I sent him the following response:
Just wanted to get back to you and let you know more about my drive configuration. I currently have three LaCie D2 drives hooked up (of various ages and sizes) via Firewire. Two of them are FW800 and one is FW400. The last one is only hooked over FW400 because that’s all the drive has (older 80GB model). All of the drives have external power bricks. I wish that you could more easily daisychain the power. I want to look into hacking one of the power cables to do that actually, but it might be more of a pain than it’s worth since it’s a multipin cable.
The last drive is a bus powered FW800 drive. It’s a little 120GB one that I use for travel between the office, since the D2 drives aren’t great for taking around. I don’t like using bus powered drives however. I graduated from Berklee and they don’t allow bus powered drives in the studios since they historically had several problems with the drives frying motherboards. I don’t honestly know if it’s still a problem, but I figure it’s best practice to limit the number of bus powered drives.
So in the end, 4 external drives go from just two cables out of my computer. I also have a Mackie 400F firewire audio interface daisy chained from the FW400 drive. It makes it nice. Since there’s no MBP docking station
If the drives haven’t been accessed for a while they do tend to go to sleep. If I open up iTunes and need to access that drive it takes a second or two to spin up initially, but asides from that they are pretty fast.
Ideally, I want to get the LaCie rackmount kit so I can mount all of the drives in the rack rails in my desk. The drives are pretty quiet most of the time, and don’t get too hot. Some people have had issues with the LaCie drives, but I think it’s just a very vocal minority. The studio I freelance at also has 3-4 LaCie drives with no problems. Nate, the President of Jazkarta, has 3-4 of them too. No probems. And at Berklee it’s pretty much the standard studio drive.
I am looking into the LaCie NAS drives, and they are coming out with a new one in a few days here at a reasonable price. Apparently according to some reports however it doesn’t support Samba (SMB), which sucks. I was going to use my Linksys router to mount the drive, but that’s a no-go. I wonder what it does use for network mounting. More research needed.