External HD, What get's stored on it?

[MX795]

Hello all, I will be purchasing a Digi001 in a few weeks. I have been told by people to also get an external HD. What exactly is stored on the external HD? is it the music that you record or is it the whole Digi program. Also which is better Glyph or seagate? SCSI or Firewire. I did look at some old threads on this and didn't really get too much out of them. Any help will be greatly appriciated. Thanks

[Kenny Gioia]

The audio files get recorded on the other Hard drive. It doesn't need to be external though. An extra IDE drive should work fine.

[where02190]

Internal ATA is also much cheaper, typically about $120 for a 40gb, which will do fine for project recording. Check Outpost.com for the best prices, and stick with IBM Deskstars, they have about the best reliability.
Configure yur drives this way, Drive one is the master, and has all your applications. Drive two is the slave, and has all the files. You can swap drives out of a G-3 or G-4 tower in about 4 minutes, so exchanging drives for different projects or clients is simple.
Hope this is helpful.

[Brent Hahn]

For once, I totally agree with everything everyone else has posted so far. A little amplification:

First off, the folks at music stores want to sell you external drives (SCSI or firewire) because that's what they have. But with any external drive, you're paying more for the box and the power supply than you are for the drive itself. With firewire you need very specific drivers and chipsets, etc. (observe the agony of others on the duc who have followed this path). SCSI's great, but you'll need an ultrawide SCSI card (expensive) and you'll eat up a PCI slot.

In the newest Macs, there is no internal SCSI bus; it's been replaced by the IDE bus. For a raw internal drive, the IBM Deskstar is a great choice. I have 2 and they've worked flawlessly. Recommended housekeeping: partition your 40-gig drives into, say, 4 10 gig drives, and optimize with Norton regularly.

You might also consider an external firewire backup drive. Rpm and seek time don't matter; it's just a hell of lot easier and faster for interim backups than the Retrospect-and-CDRW's routine. Plus, you can use it to exchange sessions with other PT systems.