Mac Mini hard drive is 4200 RPM's. Bad for recording?

[rjx]

I was all set to go out and buy one when my local Apple store opens up early this Saturday, but I am not sure now.

 

As far as audio is concerned, all I want to do is run Digital Performer 4.5

 

I would record just one track at a time and want to be able to play back around 24 tracks at once.

 

Would I be able to do what I want? And why are 7200 RPM drives preferred?

 

Thanks for any help

[alfonso]

I'm not a Mac user, but a single 4200 rpm drive in a computer for making audio is a bit too weak for me.

 

Greater speed lowers access time to data, reading 24 tracks can be demanding. I don't think this Mini Mac in it's base configuration could be a serious product for making music...I see it more as a inernet-mp3-photos thing to put in a kid's room.

If you add other stuff to it can be good, but the appeal is lost then.....no?

[Groovepusher Sly]

You should always record your audio to a fast (7200 - 10,000) external drive.

The Mac mini internal bus speed may also be a bottleneck.

 

Sly

[theblue1]

Yeah. This machine seems designed -- and well tuned and balanced for -- basic home computer tasks like Email, websurfing, homework, music and DVD playback, and so on. And it looks like an entirely decent machine for those activities. (But I'd still buy the $600 Mini, with its 80 GB drive and 512 MB of RAM, double the sizes of the $500 unit.)

 

All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to turn this machine into a G5 iMac or tower.

 

And Sly's spot on talking about the bus speed. By today's standards, it's pretty slow. The slowest iMacs, have more than triple the bus speed -- 533 MHz as opposed to 167 MHz in the Mini.

 

In fact, the $400 unit Dell is competing in this market niche with (which comes with an 80 GB drive and 512 MB of RAM, 17" monitor, keyboard, and mouse, has a FSB speed of 400 MHz, more than double the bus speed of the Mini.)

[where02190]

A second physical drive, in this case USB2.0 or FW 400 is always recommended for audio. Your internal drive then runs only the OS and app. While you won't get the performance of a 7200rpm drive, it will give you good solid performancw if you use an external FW drive for your audio. The bottleneck will be the FW interface at 400Mb/sec.

[theblue1]

Remember when folks were saying FW would be all the bandwidth we'd ever need for supporting hard drives?

 

I was just looking at the specs of the latest WD Caviar 7200's... they look like they're starting to reach toward the practical limits of FW2.

[deanmass]

I'd say if you have not purchased one yet, don't if this is the intended application. You are far better off with a g5 tower than any other flavor of mac. They are starting to come down in price on the used market. I reall ythink an older g4 tower (maybe even a dualie) would be better. You could add more drives, bet more performance, etc.

 

I think the mini iMac is a very cool thing, but I dont think I would choose one for this application given the other options available.

 

I just checked eBay...

 

Look at this.

[KenElevenShadows]

'Course, my guess is that if you were doing just a few tracks of audio or editing stereo tracks, you'd probably be okay, especially with an external fw drive.

[not Cereal]

i routinely run 32 tracks of 24bit off a firewire drive. there is a few milliseconds delay before playback if i have 1,000,000 high density edits while it loads up the buffer.

 

no problems.

[KenElevenShadows]

When you consider that I was running well over 20 tracks on SAW+ on a Micron 120Hz PC (no plug-ins with that version of SAW+, though), you should be able to do a reasonable amount on a little Mac like this!

[Hanshananigan]

in the PC world, at 7200rpm, what does an interface of "ATA/133" mean? For recording (I just got powertracks), does the interface (ATA/xxx) matter?

 

thanks-

[where02190]

133Mhz bus speed.

 

I also have run 32 Protools tracks off Firewire 400 with no problem under Le, and 50+ in HD. the limitation comes from how many plugins you try to run.

 

This machienwill do fine for basic hobby/prosumer audio.

[theblue1]

Originally posted by Ken/Eleven Shadows:

When you consider that I was running well over 20 tracks on SAW+ on a Micron 120Hz PC (no plug-ins with that version of SAW+, though), you should be able to do a reasonable amount on a little Mac like this!

Yeah, I could get 16 to 20 discrete tracks on my old Pentium (1) 133 and I think I topped it out at 22 after I switched to a 7200 RPM 20 GB drive. That was under some CW or other, probably 8 or 9, and running w/o plug ins (the CPU seemed to be the bottleneck on that one).

 

If you use sofware that's scaled to the machine its on, you usually end up with an efficient use of it. That's why it's important not to update your software, sometimes.

[mars_dup1]

Originally posted by theblue1:

And Sly's spot on talking about the bus speed. By today's standards, it's pretty slow. The slowest iMacs, have more than triple the bus speed -- 533 MHz as opposed to 167 MHz in the Mini.

Maybe I'm too old-school or something, but a G4 1.25 GHz w/167MHz bus and FW400 was what we were making hit records on a few short years ago! Yeah, a 1MB L2 would be nice, but add some memory and an external FW drive and you have a very powerful tool for making music.

 

Check out MACINTOUCH COMPARISON PAGE for a benchmark comparison of the eMac G4, iBook G4, iMac G5 and Mac Mini. Some suprising results there.

[theblue1]

Mars, based on a quick perusal of those tests, I'm not sure they support your position at all.

 

In fact, the analysis says:

As expected, with a 2.5-inch laptop drive, the Mac Mini lagged behind other desktop systems with slow disk performance equivalent to the iBook G4's. Unfortunately, there's no way around this limitation. FireWire is only a bit faster with a high-performance hard drive, and a fast hard disk on USB 2.0 is even worse than the internal notebook drive.

 

It wouldn't make sense to buy a Mini for a disk-intensive application, but it's fine for all sorts of office tasks and server applications, such as domain name servers, that aren't disk-intensive. The iMac G5 suffers from the same inability to host multiple drives on a fast interface, but at least it accomodates a single, fast 3.5-inch internal drive.

The surprising thing is that the eMac G4 outperforms the more expensive iMac G5 in some crucial disk operations. (The PowerMac G5 configured for RAID beats them all by a substantial amount.)

[Groovepusher Sly]

Originally posted by theblue1:

Mars, based on a quick perusal of those tests, I'm not sure they support your position at all.

I agree with Mars. He's basically just saying a Mac mini should at least perform as well as his G4 did.

I would guess that, with a good solid fast(7200), external FW drive, you should be able to get 16 to 24 tracks of audio. Of course the track count would decrease with excessive edits, overuse of plugins, and a virtual orchestra playing live.

I was able to play 16+ tracks with MIDI tracks reliably on a G3/266 using OS9 and DP2.6, so with OS X and DP4 the Mac mini shouldn't even break a sweat.

 

Sly

[theblue1]

I'm just repeating what MacInTouch says, of course. And they do point out that you won't get much better performance out of a fast ouboard FW drive than you'll get from the internal drive. And a USB 2 o/b drive produces worse results, according to theit tests.

 

But, sure, as I said just a few posts ago, many of us were doing plenty of productive work on machines that seem really stunted by todays standards.

 

(And my current desktop is one of those machines, a P3-500 MHz that still does mighty fine and gets a track count well into the 20's with a fair number of plug-ins [but, as always, overuse of plug-ins, or, heh heh, v-synths, sucks the juice out of it]. But I skipped the last two updates of Sonar because my desktop machine was well under the min. requirements. When I build a new box in the next couple months [something I've been saying for at least a year and a half], I'll u/g to Sonar 4.)

 

Anyhow, like I said somewhere above, the key to getting effective performance out of older machines is using software that's tuned to its capabilities. And that usually means using 'vintage' software on your 'vintage' machine.

[mars_dup1]

Originally posted by Groovepusher Sly:

 

I would guess that, with a good solid fast(7200), external FW drive, you should be able to get 16 to 24 tracks of audio. Of course the track count would decrease with excessive edits, overuse of plugins, and a virtual orchestra playing live

I regularly run 24 - 46 tracks with quite a few plugins on a B&W G3 350 with PT and Logic - (separate internal 7200 Seagate IDE). Performance used to be better with my external SCSI 9Gb Glyph, though. I never run virtual instruments live in a mix - everything gets bounced to audio. I do intend to test FW performance with the mac Mini though . Here\'s a cool link with info on FW drive performance.

[where02190]

Originally posted by theblue1:

I'm just repeating what MacInTouch says, of course. And they do point out that you won't get much better performance out of a fast ouboard FW drive than you'll get from the internal drive. .

Complete bull. Having a dedicated second physical drive for audio will give you an drastic improvement over using a single drive. It allows the system drive to seek for commands while ti at the same time seeks the audio drive to perform them.

[deanmass]

I 2nd this opinion...A 2nd physical drive has been a performance advantage for nearly EVERY application since they made 2nd drives installable/usable.

 

(from where02190)

[pseudonym]

In DP 4.5 you can "freeze" a track, which means you don't destroy the original track and you get the plug-in for as long as you want it. That can reduce the effort you're computer drive has to keep-up with the processor. I would think that if you got the 80 gig drive and then partitioned it, maybe into 3 sectors, that this would even make the program and the data storage work much better?

[KenElevenShadows]

Originally posted by theblue1:

Originally posted by Ken/Eleven Shadows:

When you consider that I was running well over 20 tracks on SAW+ on a Micron 120Hz PC (no plug-ins with that version of SAW+, though), you should be able to do a reasonable amount on a little Mac like this!

Yeah, I could get 16 to 20 discrete tracks on my old Pentium (1) 133 and I think I topped it out at 22 after I switched to a 7200 RPM 20 GB drive. That was under some CW or other, probably 8 or 9, and running w/o plug ins (the CPU seemed to be the bottleneck on that one).

 

If you use sofware that's scaled to the machine its on, you usually end up with an efficient use of it. That's why it's important not to update your software, sometimes.

Yes, sometimes that can choke the system or cause other problems. And I think I forgot the "M" when describing my computer, a 120MHz processor...whoooooops!!! See, if this thread gets reprinted in EQ, readers are gonna think, "Man, when did *that* computer come out, and how was he getting so many tracks workin' at once?"

[where02190]

Originally posted by pseudonym:

In DP 4.5 you can "freeze" a track, which means you don't destroy the original track and you get the plug-in for as long as you want it. That can reduce the effort you're computer drive has to keep-up with the processor. I would think that if you got the 80 gig drive and then partitioned it, maybe into 3 sectors, that this would even make the program and the data storage work much better?

Yes a smaller partition to use for OS and Apps will increase the drives efficiency, but don't use one of those partitions to record from, Partitioned drives, and a second physical drive are two completely different things, and partitioning a drive,using one partition for audio and another for OS/Apps will actually perform worse than not partitioning at all.

 

Best bet is to partion 10 or so GB for OS and Apps, and use the remaining partitioned space for backup.

[Dan South]

Originally posted by pseudonym:

In DP 4.5 you can "freeze" a track, which means you don't destroy the original track and you get the plug-in for as long as you want it. That can reduce the effort you're computer drive has to keep-up with the processor. I would think that if you got the 80 gig drive and then partitioned it, maybe into 3 sectors, that this would even make the program and the data storage work much better?

Logic has the "freeze" feature, too.

 

I don't think that you can partition the hard drive where the operating system resides, but you can easily partition an external Firewire drive. Firewire is the way to go for audio recording. Recording to the OS drive is strongly discouraged.

[theblue1]

Originally posted by where02190:

Originally posted by theblue1:

I'm just repeating what MacInTouch says, of course. And they do point out that you won't get much better performance out of a fast ouboard FW drive than you'll get from the internal drive. .

Complete bull. Having a dedicated second physical drive for audio will give you an drastic improvement over using a single drive. It allows the system drive to seek for commands while ti at the same time seeks the audio drive to perform them.

Take it up with Macintouch, dude.

 

They're the ones who tested it and got the results quoted.

 

Have you tested the Mini with an external FW drive?

 

They have.

[theblue1]

From Macintouch.com

This test covers a number of models -- and there are a number of very interesting disk issues in the latest Mac computers:

File Duplication

 

http://www.macintouch.com/perfpack/filedup.gif

 

One of our standard "real-world" tests of disk performance is to duplicate a large folder in the Finder. The folder contains ten copies of a 20.7-MByte file, for a folder size of 207.5 MBytes. We duplicate it several times and use a stopwatch to measure how long it takes.

 

We found these test results hard to believe at first: The eMac G4 outperformed the iMac G5. We double-checked results, but all the numbers appeared valid. Then we checked the hard drive models: This 160GB eMac uses a parallel version of the same Seagate drive used in the iMac G5. Aside from the interface, they should perform the same.

 

We then realized that these results echoed our earlier comparison of a Power Mac G4/450 with the iMac G5. The much older G4, updated with an equivalent drive, had disk performance as fast as the brand-new iMac G5 (and that's without using RAID to boost the G4 further).

 

What's going on? We finally got an explanation from a former Apple engineer (who also noted understaffing issues in Apple engineering). To summarize, Apple apparently made some design errors in low-level hardware priorities for the custom controller chips, starving the I/O system for memory bandwidth to feed the fast G5 processors. As a result, the much-slower G4 systems actually perform better in disk operations.

 

Another controller problem is said to be responsible for poor USB 2.0 disk performance with Macs, which, like FireWire, apparently runs faster on some Windows hardware.

 

In any case, disk performance is a clear win for the eMac, one of the best things about this computer. The only way to beat the eMac's disk performance is with a Power Mac G5 set up with mirrored dual-disk RAID.

 

As expected, with a 2.5-inch laptop drive, the Mac Mini lagged behind other desktop Macs, with slower disk performance equivalent to the iBook G4's. Unfortunately, there's no good way around this limitation. FireWire is only a bit faster with a high-performance hard drive, and a fast hard disk on USB 2.0 is even worse than the internal notebook drive.

 

However, we've ordered a 60GB, 7200RPM, 2.5-inch internal drive, which looked like the fastest available in this format, with plans to install it in the Mini and see how much better it might do than the stock drive.

 

So, it doesn't really make sense to buy a Mini for a disk-intensive application, but it's fine for all sorts of office tasks and other applications, such as domain name servers, that aren't disk-intensive.

 

The iMac G5 also suffers from the inability to host multiple drives on a fast interface, as the Power Mac G5 and 15"/17" PowerBook can, but at least the iMac accomodates a single, fast 3.5-inch internal drive. The iMac runs the identical drive a little slower than the eMac, thanks to the controller issues, but it should be fine for all normal uses.

 

Again -- if you've got an argument with this, your argument is with Macintouch, who did the testing. Not me.

 

But if you haven't tested it yourself -- maybe you should not be so fast to say that what other people write is "complete bull."

 

I'll keep the rest of my rather uncharitable thoughts to myself.

[deanmass]

Blue, you sure know how to beat a dead horse man...crap..

[rjx]

Thx for the help. Guess what, I am just going to get a g5 1.8 tower today. I really didn't know that the single processor 1.8 was so cheap. I found a new one for 1399. Thats sweet cause thats what I really wanted to begin with.

 

thx for the help

[Alon]

Originally posted by theblue1:

Originally posted by where02190:

Originally posted by theblue1:

I'm just repeating what MacInTouch says, of course. And they do point out that you won't get much better performance out of a fast ouboard FW drive than you'll get from the internal drive. .

Complete bull. Having a dedicated second physical drive for audio will give you an drastic improvement over using a single drive. It allows the system drive to seek for commands while ti at the same time seeks the audio drive to perform them.

Take it up with Macintouch, dude.

 

They're the ones who tested it and got the results quoted.

 

Have you tested the Mini with an external FW drive?

 

They have.

It is complete bull. The huge disk test they did was to copy one 207 meg file and duplicate it. Big fucking deal, I just did the same test on my powerbook, took me a few seconds to do. Copying one shitty file has nothing to do with how many audio tracks a drive can handle.

[Alon]

And just to add one thing. Based on the test results on that site, the mac mini comes out pretty fucking strong in all areas (besides the 2.5 drive, which is obvious to anybody with a brain), even compared to other macs which cost twice as much.