johnnyalan Posted December 4, 2012 Share Posted December 4, 2012 Hi all, I just ordered the new imac 27" 3.4GHZ i7 with 16GB ram and fusion 1TB HD option. This will be an upgrade from my 2008 24" 4GB ram 500GB HD computer. I have 2 external 500 GB Glyph Drives (one for projects and one for large sound libraries: East West stuff, Trilian, Komplete, etc...). The new imac comes with 2 Thunderbolt and 4 USB 3.0 connectors. 2 problems are that the HD's are Firewire 800 & eSATA and my audio interface(s) are Firewire 400. I thought the best way to solve the drive problem is to get 2 eSATA to USB 3.0 Adapters and take up 2 USB ports (one for each drive): http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/ADESATAUSB3/ It seems this might allow for higher data transfers than daisy chaining the 2 drives to a Thunderbolt port with a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 connector. Any thoughts on this? Also, I was wondering if the Libraries would do just as well on the internal Fusion Drive. This will of course push the fusion drive immediately over the 128 GB SSD portion (they are quite large). Since the Fusion Drive is always calculating what's used the most, and moving stuff around, I wonder how these large libraries will perform there. Thanks... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n6smith Posted December 4, 2012 Share Posted December 4, 2012 FWIW.. I also use Glyphs FW800 drives but my iMac has a FW800 port so I use that for both of my main Glyph drives and I have never had a problem... even when adding to the end of that chain a FW400 Motu Ultralite as well. No glitches or issues of any kind with the speed of my HD access, streaming large sample sets and so on.. It has all worked well without issue at all.. Now... I decided to try out the T'Bolt to FW800 adaptor for some additional Seagate and Glyph FW800 drives I had lying around and that is where i came across, what is apparently a bug with ML which has not been fixed, to date (10.8.2 plus supplementals). I have also managed to replicate this bug originally on 2 of my systems and now after testing further this week, on all three of my ML setups... and it is quite annoying to say the least. Here is the link to my report on Apple's forums... https://discussions.apple.com/message/20419447#20419447 I have since taken the ext HDs off the T'Bolt to FW800 adaptor and just use the adaptor for running my Motu off of.. and I have had no further issues.. but i wanted to post this info up for you, because you will be running 10.8.2 on the new iMac... of the possibility of this bug and it's consequences if you use the adaptor for your FW800 Ext HDs... As far as i am aware, you cannot downgrade to Lion or ML because neither contains drivers for your fusion drive nor probably some other hardware in the new iMacs. Finally, as I don't have USB3 ports on any of my rigs I cannot comment on those or their use with eSATA drives and adaptors... or the use of a fusion Drive for samples... Maybe someone else can step in and advise you. HTH in some small way... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnnyalan Posted December 5, 2012 Author Share Posted December 5, 2012 Thanks for the good input. I'm glad to hear that the Motu Ultralite works with the Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter and probably a FW800 to FW400 cable. I think my best option for the drives is to go with the eSATA to USB 3.0 cable. It looks like the bandwidth will be quite a bit higher that way. I'll report back to let people know of how it performs with Logic. I do wonder about the fusion drive with large music libraries. Will it move them around from the HD to the SSD as you use them frequently? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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