FireWire for audio?

We're using two U2W SCSI drives for audio right now, which clocks to sustained transfer rates of something like 9.x Mb/s each (don't know how to clock them both at the same time). Usually this is enough for 64 track playback, but not when the tracks' edit density is too high. But I've never been a huge fan of separating audio onto two drives, and wouldn't mind not having to worry about edit density. So ... since FireWire drives have now been around for quite some time, and new drives are reported to have sustained transfer rates of aprox 35 Mb/s, could this be a solution that would actually out-perform our old two-drive solution? People have told me Digidesign doesn't like FireWire drives, but if anyone has any more info on this subject I'd be very interested in it.

I just went to Firewire with a pair of 40 gig EZ Quest Cobra + drives, and I have to say they're fantastic. I'm getting a sustained transfer rate of 37 Mb/s, plus they're incredibly quiet, easy to set up, and best of all, cheap...$225 each. One word of caution...some firewire disk formatting software is, according to Digidesign, "not ProTools friendly". The utility progam that came with the Cobras (Speed Tools) was one of them. Formatting with it caused ProTools to give me DAE -9060 errors and crash. The fix is easy though...simple re-format the drives using the standard Apple OS software, and everything is fine.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by Chico: I just went to Firewire with a pair of 40 gig EZ Quest Cobra + drives, and I have to say they're fantastic. I'm getting a sustained transfer rate of 37 Mb/s, plus they're incredibly quiet, easy to set up, and best of all, cheap...$225 each. One word of caution...some firewire disk formatting software is, according to Digidesign, "not ProTools friendly". The utility progam that came with the Cobras (Speed Tools) was one of them. Formatting with it caused ProTools to give me DAE -9060 errors and crash. The fix is easy though...simple re-format the drives using the standard Apple OS software, and everything is fine.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Thanks for letting me know. How many hard disk tracks are you running side to side on one of those bad boys, and at which edit density? We often need all 64 tracks our mixplus allows simultaneously, at rather high edit density. Thanks!