Back to the bleeding edge…
“We are very interested in the newer SCSI Ultra160 drives, which I don’t know very much about (except they come in much bigger sizes and the controller cards cost a lot)–but the bigger drives are cheaper. Supposedly they are backward-compatible with UltraWide and SCSI-2 controllers. Are they a good idea for our Digi and MotU DAW systems?”
In many respects the vote is still out on these, but preliminary tests show they work just fine in existing systems. You don’t fully benefit from their great speed with old SCSI hardware, and they are noisy due to their high rotational speeds, but they do work as far as we can tell. We would not recommend upgrading your SCSI controller cards to Ultra160 at this time. When it comes to storage needs the common sense approach has been that more performance is always better, but in practice we have not always found that to be the case. To begin with, Ultra Wide and SCSI2 technology is more than adequate for any audio DAW system you are likely to encounter. You just don’t need Ultra160. Think about it. Ultra160 has a maximum transfer rate of 160 MB per second. Let’s round that down and say the ‘real world’ rate of a good system might be 100 MB per second. That’s 6 gigabytes per minute. Measuring against 24/96 audio at a data rate of roughly 17 MB per minute per track means you would be able to record and play (with room to spare) over 350 tracks of audio. Unless you are recording the next Michael Jackson album this probably isn’t relevant to you. Besides, the bigger issue is the computing power of the CPU. Just because your SCSI chain can handle that much data doesn’t mean your computer or the software running on it can actually deal with mixing, fading, and processing anywhere near that many tracks of audio. It can’t. Plus, as we’ve reported before, we’ve seen a few cases of fast SCSI controllers monopolizing computer resources to the extent that performance actually goes DOWN on the audio system with a faster SCSI card. In many cases we’ve had to set fast SCSI controllers to lower speeds in order for host based systems to have the bandwidth to process the audio data properly. In short, feel free to experiment with the Ultra160 drives, but we’d stay away from the controller cards right now.