Pro Tools 9 with NAS as Record Volume
 

Hello all. Done a fair amount of research into this topic the last few days and I am looking for someone to steer me in the right direction.

I recently bought and setup a NAS (in JBOD for now) to use as backup for all my various computers and old hard drives. Now that I have my ProTools session archive created, all my old and new sessions are in the same place for the first time. I would really like to be able to do editing, mixing, etc. via my ProTools computer without having to actually transfer them to it’s local hard drive (some of the sessions are 200gb or more and that takes a lot of time!). However, as many of us know, PTs 9 (9.0.3 on OSX 10.6.8 in my case) doesn’t support the use of NAS as record volumes.

My question is;

Is there ANY way to trick the OS into ‘mounting’ my ProTools archive as if it were a local disk so that ProTools will allow me to change it into a Record volume instead of just a Transfer volume?

I have read some tantalizing threads elsewhere claiming it can be done in ProTools 9 with custom scripts, but for the life of me I can’t find the actual method one might use to do such a thing. The best I have managed is I can get the archive server connected automatically and semi-permanently, and access it without entering credentials but ProTools still sees it as a volume that is neither ‘fixed, removable or MediaNet’.

Really don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of trying to upgrade to a newer version of ProTools just yet, but I know version 10 and later support NAS as record volumes. So unless I can figure this out, I either have to transfer these massive sessions before I can work on them or upgrade my workstation.

Thanks in advance! Let’s see what you’ve got hivemind!!

Re: Pro Tools 9 with NAS as Record Volume
 

Bad idea in general. Pro Tools 9 has a much older disk IO subsystem than current versions and lacks the disk cache that makes a huge difference.

But you don't actually provide much useful info. What NAS? What client computer/OS? What NAS protocol? (CIFS? Apple? NFS?). What speed drives in it? What physical Ethernet speed? How are you backing up/archiving the sessions on your NAS server? (but all that would help folks to know if what you want to do is just a bad idea or completely crazy).

You are likely creating world of hurt all for solving the inconvenience of dragging and dropping a folder icon too/from a NAS server (and doing that lets you manually control point in time-recovery options, and gives you redundancy of local and NAS storage, so is often a great thing).