Record to 7200 rpm eSATA- How many tracks at once?

Does anyone have any benchmarks for this? 1: I want to use eSATA to record live bands. I doubt I'd ever have to record more than 18 tracks at once. My oc'ed quad cpu won't be a bottleneck, and there won't be any other tracks laying back at the same time. I keep my HW buffer super-fast. Typically 128 samples. Can a 7200 rpm drive handle this with 100% reliability, or should I get a 10K drive? 2: Does eSATA require any electronic handshaking, the way IDE drives in FW enclosures do? In other word, could some enclosures give faster throughput than others? I assume no, but want to be sure. 3: Are there any enclosures known to be good for large, hot drives? I know that some of the cheaper ones cause overheating. I need the best. 4: Recommended drives in the 250 - 300 gig range? -thanks

Hi CableAddict, I don't have any benchmarks for this, but I was planning to get me an Antec MX-1 housing (you can read a review on ). This one should keep the drive pretty cool (and silent!). eSata is the same speed as internal, so that should be no problem. What bit depth and samplerate are you recording? Why are you recording with a HW buffer of only 128 samples? That seems to be unnecessary stressing of your system... (when you'r recording a live band without FX...) with 18 tracks (24bit, 44.1kHz) you would need a transfer rate of 2.3 MB/s. Even at 96 kHz it would be no problem for a 7200rpm disk. For HD recommendations you could also look on or Eddy

Cant remember where I saw the math for it, but the transfer rates of a 7200rpm drive should let you stream upwards of 100 tracks. 10K drives are just not neccesary.

Yeah, eSATA should be plenty fast for most recording needs nowadays. Just remember that as the hard disk fills up with data, read and write speeds will decrease. As for finding a good drive, check this out: Tom's Hardware is a great place to go for tech reviews in general, and their hard drive performance charts are no exception. As for external enclosures, I'd just go to Newegg and check user ratings.

Hi, I'd also say, a buffer of 128 samples is a bit risky, especially if you wanna do live-recordings. A live-performance can't be repeated and your customers or your band won't be happy if you have to admit, that the recording clicks and stutters or the tracks run out of sync due to data loss. -Data

Thanks, guys. I figured I'd be OK but wanted to check. Regarding the buffer: This has to be. I actually use Reaper as the mixer, so latency is a major issue. The main reason I switched from Ableton Live to Reaper was because Reaper lets me run at 2.8 ms total throughput, whereas Ableton, with the same plugins, is around 6-7 ms. It's been working fine for about a year, but I never tried to simultaneously record more than 8 tracks before, and never externally, so it thought I'd check first. My audio card is a Lynx PCIe, so that probably helps as well, taking some I-O burden off of the cpu.

I would really like to be able to record on two different hard drive at a time in Reaper for big sessions at 88.2 or 96khz.

BTW- I'm still curious what folks consider to be a really good eSATA enclosure. I don't want my drives burning up. That Antec MX-1 Eddy mentioned looks good. Any others?

Try browsing through this for external enclosures: Remember that heat is usually less of an issue because the hard drive has all that cool air floating around outside, as opposed to hot and compressed air inside of a computer case.

I had a couple of Vantec external drive enclosures and the heat is dissipated through the case and seemed to work well. With no fans they are 'silent'. Many companies seem to be using this design.