Quick apology in advance, I've been thinking on a few performance issues and have gathered a mass of questions which I wanted to toss out and get some feedback on before I spend any money and tinker. So excuse the littany of questions.
Okay. As many may know, I've been using a laptop rig with my CW cards in a Magma chasasis for a while. As far as laptop motherboards go for PCI bandwidth, I think I've got one of the best available (from last year's roundups at least). But I still run into PCI bandwidth issues and they piss me off a great deal, but not enough for me to ditch the laptop rig.
I'm starting to get in that experimental mood and have been trying to figure out ways to squeeze out a little more bandwidth.
I know if I turn off USB I'll get a decent boost in resources, but there are some caveats and unknowns.
The first is, obviously, I'll not be able to use USB devices while I record, so I'll have to move to a serial based 8x8 midi port. The M-Audio one looks kewl, but I wonder how my midi timing will be affected moving away from the Midex 8.
Obviously, I'm using the Midex with Cubase SX which entails that I'd have to get a crack as my dongle would no longer run, but that's not a big deal. I own a license after all.
What is a big deal is that with my usage of plugs like BFD (and the new XFL pack) I'm going to need a LOT more HD space, which means I'm left popping for a firewire drive. I can, of course, get an external drive that uses both USB and Firewire -just in case... but I'm curious if the HD controller itself will have a major impact on my audio performance. Is getting a LaCie drive or something like that REALLY going to give me smoother audio performance? I'm only getting 20 ASIO tracks with one P100 as it stands, so Track count limitations are not a big problem for me right now.
On a side note, what would give me the best performance in terms of separating samples/audio files/Windows OS between the internal and ext. drives? I imagine that having the gig+ sample banks on the ext drive would aid in performance, but running several audio tracks off of the same HD that the OS is on might hit performance pretty hard too, no?
Any experience in this realm be it desktop or laptop?
Does Firewire400 take up any less PCI resources than USB2? I've got 3 USB ports on my computer and only 1 firewire. Obviously a hub can fix the firewire port #, but it's what the motherboard will bear and the bandwidth effeciency of the competing technologies that I'm concerned with.
Even more, the firewire port is on the same chip as my TI Cardbus Controller, so they share the same IRQ. This may erase any potential gains, though who knows... maybe not.
Lastly, I'd be giving up a lot of kewl new automation devices like the new 24ch. Tascam controller which runs USB only. Does anyone have any recommendations on moving fader Firewire/Midi controllers which have a joystick?
Thanks in advance,
Sam