My Macbook Pro has
run out of grunt for what I’m doing, so I am considering upgrading to
the iMac i7. However, I have a dilemma regarding the single Firewire
port on that model. I want to use the system drive for Logic and a 2TB
Firewire external drive for recording, sample libraries and storing
projects. I will also use an external USB drive for backup. I don’t
tend to record more than two channels simultaneously through the
interface, which is the TC Electronic SK48. TC Electronic advise you to
use the SK48 on a dedicated Firewire bus (perhaps to prevent the risk
of problems if streaming multiple channels simultaneously). I do all my
mixing in the box and have relatively high track counts (approximately
60), along with high plug-in counts. I don’t want to shell out for a
Mac Pro just to gain an extra Firewire port. Can you give me any advice
on daisy-chaining my interface to an iMac via a Firewire drive and
whether I should be considering the move up to a Mac Pro?
Though
the iMac used to have two Firewire ports, the new i7 only features one.
This may prove a problem for those using lots of Firewire devices, but
at least the four USB ports offer alternative connectivity.
Via SOS web site
SOS Reviews
Editor Matt Houghton replies:
I think the answer may be far more
straightforward than you think! I’m unclear as to whether you already
possess the drives you’re talking about, but there’s plenty of
connectivity on the iMac i7: you get four USB 2.0 ports, one FW800 port
and a Gigabit Ethernet port. So if you were setting up from scratch, it
would allow you to run your Firewire audio interface and four separate
external drives over USB, without any sharing a port.
If
you need to use the drives you’ve mentioned in the question then,
personally, I’d be happy to try daisy-chaining the Firewire drive and
the TC interface. I presume that you don’t have all 60 channels of
audio streaming all the time (that’s likely to be one muddy mix!) but,
even then, while there are no guarantees, it could well work. If it
doesn’t, you could try swapping the drives over, putting what is
currently your Firewire drive in the USB enclosure, and vice versa, so
your Firewire drive becomes the backup. You could also try splitting the
read-write burden between different drives, with samples on one, audio
on another, and so on.
I’m conscious that some
people have reported that USB drives have been too slow for their audio
work. I tend to use a lot of external drives — both USB and Firewire —
and I’ve never, personally, experienced huge problems running even the
busiest mix from either type (my day-to-day one is a USB2 drive) with
Mac or PC. However, if you do find that you need a faster drive and
aren’t able to use the Firewire connection, you could consider adding a
hard drive that connects via the iMac’s Ethernet port (assuming you
don’t plan to use that for anything else).
Of
course, if you think you might need to expand the system further with
DSP accelerator cards, you really do need to think about a more
flexible setup, which is where the Mac Pro option really comes into
play. Personally, I’d opt for the Mac Pro simply for the flexibility.
I’d never feel that confident that my needs wouldn’t change and, if I
wanted faster, higher bandwidth drives, I’d be able to upgrade with a
USB3 card when the time was right. On the other hand, there’s no such
thing as future-proofing in the world of computers and, as you do almost
everything inside the box, I reckon you should be able to get a
perfectly good setup, with several external drives, based around the
iMac i7.
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