ProTools 10 on MacBook Air

[Hearfilm]

Any chance this would work for small track counts... mainly editing. Anyone using a setup on an Air?

[nst7]

You should be able to do quite a bit on the Air. For best results, you should still have your audio on an external hard drive. You can use a firewire drive and just get the Apple $29 Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter.

[Bielefeld]

The MacBook Air should be plenty for you. I do agree with nst7 that you should look into an external hard drive to record to. As far as I know Avid does not support SSD which the Air has. The SSD will work as your main drive but you might see issues with it as a recording drive.


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[Hearfilm]

So with a late 2008 AIR.. I have no thunderbolt.... and only the one usb port. SOL?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Hearfilm

So with a late 2008 AIR.. I have no thunderbolt.... and only the one usb port. SOL?

Pretty much, it's far from a recommended configuration and not where you really want to be.

Now I know somebody is goign to say they have an old air running Pro Tools and working fine recording to the system or an external USB drive, but if you are really lucky you can get Pro Tools running on a pair of smelly old socks, but the socks (or Air) are likely to be flaky and/or just not perform well.

Darryl

[TimNielsen]

Not sure why people would recommend using an external drive with the air, when the internal SSD is capable of 200+ megs a second. As long as lots of other things aren't also running, it will be fine.

I had PT10 installed on my Core 2 Duo air, and was able to run a very intense demo session with 64+ tracks, instruments, a bunch of plugins, etc, right from the internal SSD, and it didn't hiccup once.

And the newest SSDs in the airs are even faster.

If you really want to go external, get an SSD in a thunderbolt case, there are a few popping up now. That will give you a ridiculously fast external drive.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by TimNielsen

Not sure why people would recommend using an external drive with the air, when the internal SSD is capable of 200+ megs a second. As long as lots of other things aren't also running, it will be fine.

Modern Flash SSDs are incredible devices (and PCIe flash cards even more so) but they are relatively complex beasts, with asymmetrical read/write performance, on-the-fly compression, complex garbage collection (e.g. GC can might cause spikes of IO performance degradation at times), etc. All highly depended on the Flash chips, controller chipset, device driver, current and past read/write/IO patterns, etc. If a single SSD disk is working great for you with your workload that is great, and the more folks here who can help on DUC by describing what they are able to do with exactly SSD disks and type of workload the better. But there are certainly technical reasons not to just assume a single system+audio or system+audio+sample SSD is a safe choice for everybody's IO requirements.

Darryl