Recording Handbook - Hol.gr

I was reading [about] SAW when I came across the story .. [of]
hardware woes.. [Some guy] had recently bought a new computer system
for specific use with SAW. Then he discovered that he could only
record two tracks and required memory and hard drive upgrades. What
was his system lacking? (I've also heard rumours that SAW requires
extra toys to function at full capacity.)
(**CAUTION** The information below may be totally erroneous. It is an
amalgam of the fruits of personal research, the advice of friends and
potentially bull-sh*tty rumours. Please e-mail me with corrections or
expressions of disgust. Proceed.)
I've picked the brains of a few friends and learned that:
1. You need an advanced IDE card for your computer. I guess
motherboards made earlier than last fall can't access hard drives
larger than 540Mb. An advanced IDE card will access up to 1.08Gig and
function quite quickly. A friend claims that advanced IDE has a data
transfer rate that is even faster than SCSI (though SCSI drives can be
much larger than IDE drives).
2. You should go with a decent soundcard. According to a
hardware/software guru-friend, all current Soundblaster cards are
incapable of simultaneous recording and playback (not to mention that
their S/N ratio kind of bites). I saw this claim contradicted in a
recent issue of Keyboard magazine (Nov 94?). I'm still trying to
figure this one out. Apparently, Turtle Beach's Tahiti card works
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