hard drive compatibility

[qingcong]

Hi, I wanted to see if the following external firewire/esata drives were compatible with protools LE. I know that esata has not been approved, but I think most people report that it works just fine. There's also been stuff I've read about using a 7200rpm spindle speed, not sure if that's important? Is it recommended to use firewire 800 over 400? I'm have a Gateway core i3 desktop and an mbox 2.

Here are the ones I've been looking at -
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...703&CatId=4230


http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4490435&CatId=4229

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...444&CatId=4230

Thanks.

[spkguitar]

If you want something compatible, get one of these:

Mercury Elite-AL Pr 500GB

Mercury Elite-AL Pro 1TB

Mercury Elite-AL Pro 2TB

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by spkguitar

If you want something compatible, get one of these:

Mercury Elite-AL Pr 500GB

Mercury Elite-AL Pro 1TB

Mercury Elite-AL Pro 2TB

These are the ones I always recommend as well. 7200 rpm is the minimum speed(and 10K have not shown significant improvement, but add more noise). FW800 sometimes has its own problems of compatibility so I recommend the version of these drives that have dual FW400 ports for easy daisy-chaining with Avid/Digi interfaces.

[Jamaican]

I like Western Digital for their reliability, but it seems a bit difficult to find them with Fw400 now unless your gonna buy the Mac ones or reformat or find them somewhere else than from my usual new egg source. Once you download the stuff thats on Western Digital site, they work wonderful. My own is 500gb with usb/fw/esata, I've never tried the esata however.

Those mercury ones recommended earlier in this thread look real tempting though, I'm gonna get one of those for my next hard drive, I like everything I'm seeing on that link referred about two or three posts before this one. I've never seen a moderately priced hard drive that is actually recommended by Avid. I'm impressed also by that 3 year warranty. Most external hds give only a year.

I've always seen dead Fantom and Acomdata drives in various studios lol, and heard of them being unrelaible, but at the other end, I've always seen individuals with more than one dead one, so there might be an upside to them. Can't vouch for Verbatim, I just know they make nice media blanks i.e. cdrs, dvds.

[Bob Olhsson]

ESATA just means External SATA which is just a more rugged connector than internal SATA.

[qingcong]

Originally Posted by spkguitar

If you want something compatible, get one of these:

Mercury Elite-AL Pr 500GB

Mercury Elite-AL Pro 1TB

Mercury Elite-AL Pro 2TB

Thanks for the links. What specifically does a hard drive need to be compatible with protools?

[Benoni]

Do yourself a favor and just get a Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM 32MB cache drive and install it in a USB/E-SATA external case. Use the E-SATA hook up for use with Pro Tools. E-SATA beats the pants off any firewire drive.

Also, why do you want an external if you are working on a desktop? Just install another drive inside the case.

[qingcong]

Originally Posted by Benoni

Do yourself a favor and just get a Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM 32MB cache drive and install it in a USB/E-SATA external case. Use the E-SATA hook up for use with Pro Tools. E-SATA beats the pants off any firewire drive.

Also, why do you want an external if you are working on a desktop? Just install another drive inside the case.

Thanks for the suggestion. Have you had any problems using esata with protools? I'm all for using esata cause it's blazing, but I don't want to run into any compatibility issues.

Again, I'd be all for installing another internal drive, but the mbox handbook recommends using an external drive... so I mean, I'll stick with an external drive if that's what they tell me to do. I guess if I'm going to use esata anyways, I might as well use an internal sata?

[JMS40]

I think you've mis-read the handbook. A secondary drive is the recommendation and an internal drive will out perform an external.

[spkguitar]

Most people who use the mbox are using laptops. That was really the target audience of the device, hence the recommendation in the "handbook" for an external drive.

You need a separate drive, one way or another.
IMHO, if you can install an internal, you should go for an internal.

eSATA drives have been working for everyone that I know that use them. The only reason NOT to use an eSATA external drive is if you intend on taking your sessions on those externals to multiple different studios where you don't know the capabilities. Firewire would be better in those instances.

For instance, in my studio I don't have eSATA capabilities (yet), so if you brought your eSATA drive here for mixing, etc., you would be out of luck. (unless of course it had a dual interface, which most of them have).