Internal Storage

In critical applications like audio/video, hard drives quality is as important as RAM quality, because all your audio and video data will reside on it. When the drive goes down, you are in deep trouble. There are vast quality differences between drives built for different purposes so you need to know which drives you can trust. Needless to say, we use only the fastest, most reliable server-grade models available at any given moment. Price differences against cheap office cousins are so small that it's absolutely crazy to jeopardise your data because of petty cash.

For audio and video applications with internal storage, SATA drives have replaced the more expensive SCSI drives. The ever growing transfer rates and bigger capacities make SATA drives the most cost-effective solution for both recording and short-term storage. But as always, there are quality differences and workflow considerations so feel free to tap into our experience to find the most sensible solution for your specific needs.

SATA (Serial ATA) drives are standard in Macs and latest Windows machines. The cables used are very different from PATA as SATA needs far less data lanes because it's a serial standard. The 8 mm wide data cable used (on the right) can be up to 1 m long. PATA ribbon cables, in comparison, are limited to 46 cm in length.

The SATA power connector (on the left) is smaller than standard power connector. The larger number of pins is used to supply three different voltages — 3.3 V, 5 V, and 12 V.

PATA drives which were called ATA before, were retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA) when SATA was rolled out 2003. First versions of PATA drives were know as IDE and EIDE as well. PATA uses 40-pin connectors ribbon cables (on the right) and a standard 4-pin power connector (on the left).

An extended standard called ATAPI was developed in order to support removable media and is usually used for CD and DVD drives.

SCSI standard was introduced in 1986 and was used in the Macs until PowerPC models. It is mostly used for hard disks and tape storage devices, but also connects a wide range of other devices, including scanners, printers, CD-ROM drives, CD recorders, and DVD drives. In fact, the entire SCSI standard promotes device independence, which means that theoretically SCSI can be used with any type of computer hardware.

SCSI is still used on high-performance workstations, servers, and RAID arrays. Desktop computers and notebooks usually have the ATA/IDE or the newer SATA interfaces. SCSI comes in many different flavours like SCSI, SCSI-2, Fast SCSI (8-bit Narrow), Ultra SCSI (8-bit Narrow), Ultra Wide SCSI (16-bit Wide), Ultra2 SCSI (16-bit Wide), Ultra 160 SCSI (16-bit Wide) and Ultra 320 SCSI (16-bit Wide).

Here on the right you can see two examples of the most commonly used SCSI connectors: A 68-pin wide SCSI connector (above) and a 50-pin narrow SCSI connector (below). Yes, the "wide" connector is actually physically narrower than the "narrow". As you may have noticed, SCSI is complicated (and we haven't even talked about termination yet...) which was one of the reasons it has been mostly replaced by SATA, PATA and FibreChannel.

Basement Tales

First the basic truth about disks: Every hard disk will crash, it's just a question of time.

I don't know if you read the Fiat/Ferrari-story on the Glyph page but the same applies here. There are different drives for different purposes - even from the same manufacturer. Cheapest are the office disks which are fine for a secretary who presses "save" few times a hour when writing a letter. At the other end are high-end disks for servers and audio/video which have to work 24/7 at full load.

But even great disks will die and have a relatively short shelve life so you should never archive stuff on hard disks. Let me repeat: You should never archive stuff on hard disks. That's only for people who will hate themselves in few years when they want to retrieve the (only) copy of a now-classic recording and the disk won't spin up after chilling few years in the closet. I've seen that happening and it ain't pretty. Consider budgeting few thousand for a clean-room data rescue facility - few thousands without success guarantee...

One more thing: Forget RAID for audio. It's only trouble. At audio work, seek time and reliability are the main issues, not throughput which is important at video work. RAID makes only sense for audio in a SAN but that's another story.