Firewire is much better than USB <2. I have yet to experience a USB 2-device, so I wouldn't know there.

We know folks that are having good luck with firewire drives in video editing scenarios, but bear in mind that there is seldom alot of video tracks being played at once, generally speaking. The theoretical throughput of firewire is 40mbps, which should be plenty, however it is the sustained tranfer rate that determines whether or not your project will happily play back without problems, and I suspect actual figures in this regard are not quite what the theoretical ones are.

Other than perhaps the hot pluggable portability of firewire drives I would have to say that they offer no real advantage over a good SCSI system, which is itself quite modular if setup properly, and is very realiable and fast. The drives are plentiful, rugged, and most have a warranty period of 5 years. You can hang 15 drives off of a typical Adaptec controller, and the "old" Ultra 2 80mbps controllers are reasonable to buy and work fine for the majority of A/V work. We still use them and have no complaints.

The optical external SAN solutions work extremely well, but you can expect to pay out the ying yang for good systems. They can sustain the playback of a silly number of audio tracks from a single drive, though.

Finally I would be very cautious about USB storage solutions. Turn USB off and forget about it for A/V. In my mind there are simply too many issues with regards to USB in an A/V environment that make it a risk worth not taking. Maybe too early to tell with USB 2 but as long as there are tried and proven alternatives, what's to get excited about.

I've been using an IDE drive mounted in a firewire hard drive box by ADS Technologies. It's been working great for me. I can move it between a laptop and desktop, which makes it convenient. Also, the ADS box allows you to update/replace the drive with any of the shelf IDE drive.

I eventually achieved success recording to a FireWire drive, after much trial and error. This is on a Sony notebook using XPProSP1, with FireWire drive formatted with NTFS, 64k cluster size. From what I've read, FWire is better suited than USB for such duties, but audio on PC's is a complex set of variables, the audio driver is probably the most important factor, and they're all over the map. I recently switched to EchoAudio Mia on my desktop editing PC, and have had better results with SForge6 and Vegas4, compared to Audiophile 2496, and I think the drivers are the big difference.
FWIW,
Rick Z

>>I recently switched to EchoAudio Mia on my desktop editing PC, and have had better results with SForge6 and Vegas4, compared to Audiophile 2496, and I think the drivers are the big difference.
FWIW,
Rick Z <<

Rick, could you please say more about this? Specifically about your "better results" with the Mia compared to the Audiophile.

Thanks,

drbam

Uh-oh, now I have to 'splain myself . . I remember reading a post by someone saying Mia drivers causing him zero problems. Having chased driver problems both with my Notebook and (less-frequently) with Desktop, I can't say I remember exactly the issues with 2496. I use GigaStudio,Wavelab,SForge6,Vegas4 on desktop, now with Mia card, previously with 2496, previously with RME PST. I went to 2496 because RME did not at the time have GSIF for W2k. On the notebook, I could not get SF6 or V4 to work with Digigram VXPocket, I got a completely bogus concert recording, full of clicks and pops with SF6, Digigram V5.00d driver. But Wavelab works fine with ASIO driver V5.00d.

Since I can't really remember the exact problem with the 2496, and don't want to take the time to re-install it , I should retract my comment, except the part that everything works perfectly with the Mia.
FWIW . .
Rick Z

i have been using (3) 60gig 5400rpm drives for audio. these have actually been faster for me. i can record 24 tracks at once with no problems, before i could only do about 10 with my ide drives. make sure you have the firewire card on the oposite pci buss as your sound card.

I'd like to report, finally, success with recording via USB from my Toshiba laptop. I have an Echo Mona card and discovered that switching its driver settings from WDM to "PureWave" resolved the glitching. Meanwhile, I had bought a Firewire card and tried it, too (I'm using an ADS drive enclosure w/both Firewire and USB ports). I haven't done any huge multitrack testing at this point but I can say with certainty that both Firewire and USB 2.0 are working equally successfully at the moment now that I have changed the sound card's setting.