Hi! I would go for scsi U2W. Note that UW has the capacity to drive about 65 cm cable-length irl. But U2W supports at least 3 meters worst case and with really good cables you can add up to 2 meters more. That means you still have the option to get the drives in a separate box, and the possibility to soundproof them (I have mine in another room). Why not Firewire? Well, there is very few drives available, and those aren't exactly state of the art. But the main downside is that all drive manufacturers have decided not to support firwire in the future due to apples approach to the licence-fees. It is exactly the same story as when IBM put licence-fees for the microchannel-bus and the PC-world answered that with creating the pci-bus. There is actually one more reason. Firewire did not perform as expected. They (hard-drive manufacturers) where never able to get performance to match even regular scsi-2 drives and since the licence-fees would get the firewire drives more expensive in spite of lower production-costs, then firewire kind of died. The idea of firewire is still good though. Expect to see a comparable standard introduced in the pc-world that is licence-free in the near future, and also expect it to finally kill off firewire totally. Unless Apple makes firewire licence-free before that, but the firewire standard needs some tweaking before it gets good enough for hard-drives though... I totally flip out in the following section. Please skip if you like... :-) Lately I've been setting up a fibre-channel system for a large corporation. Two parallel cabinets of 630 Gb each and with a transfer speed of 1.2 Gigabyte per second and a average seek-rate of 4.2 ms. Each cabinet has 4 Gb cache memory. Now THAT is a promising set-up! Although each cabinet weights about 960 Kg without the disks installed and costs a lot of money. But not more than the larger studios actually could afford to buy it. I am uncertain though that the system is compatible with anything else than rather large servers, but a server-machine running NT on multiple processors and a special NT-version of preferred software could be a nice set-up anyway... :-) Scott L Wilson wrote: > > From: Scott L Wilson <flowrgds@...> > > Hi > > I am making the jump to G4, starting with a native audio system. Are > Firewire drives available for reasonable prices, or should I get a scsi > UW card? I'd like to run around 32 simultaneous tracks, Logic Platinum > and motu 24i /1224, to clarify my usage. > Thanks in advance for your help!! > > Scott -- Bo Eriksson (Snake Plissken) snake@... http://travel.to/snake/