Ethernet Hard Drives?

[worldclassmusician]

Hi,

just bought a new MacBook Pro (2009 model) and in looking for a Firewire hard drive, I learned that Ethernet Drives are much faster.

Had a look on the digi design website and can't find anything about ethernet hard drives.

As yet, I've not gotten round to installing protools to my mac, but just wondering if the Ethernet drive will work ok?

I'll be using BFD, Guitar Rig and storing my audio files to the ethernet drive. Any ideas, experience, suggestions most welcome.

Thanks in advance for the advice.

Tony

[Gothboy]

AFAIK you can't record to an ethernet drive with Pro Tools.

[CME]

These had been mentioned before but I'm not sure Digi ever responded. As Apple seems to really want to remove FW ports from the MacBooks these look like a possible solution. Not sure anyone has tried one to see. FW's biggest advantage, from my understanding anyways, is it's continuous throughput and lower CPU usage. Not sure how Ethernet drives stack up comparably. CPU interrupts would be my biggest concern regardless of overall throughput that Ethernet could provide.

[worldclassmusician]

Hey guys,

thanks for the info so far. If I can't record to the drive, do you reckon I'd still be able to install BFD, etc to it and access the audio from that rather than install to my system drive?

I've already bought the drive (possibly sadly!!)

[Craig F]

absolute worst case you can use it for backing up to

if it can do iSCSI it might work for recording

it might work for samples, at least for storage the ones you pick may need to be copied to the drive were the session is

[Gothboy]

You can certainly try one and consider yourself on the cutting edge so long as it's not interrupting your workflow.

[moonrunner]

When I use a drive connected via ethernet on my mbp, it is slower then firewire 800.

[worldclassmusician]

Thanks a lot guys,

what firewire 800 drive would you recommend? As you say, at worst I can use the Ethernet drive to connect all of my computers to remotely or as a nice backup. I'm thinking seagate, 7200rpm firewire 800, 1Tb.

I'm going to try the ethernet drive with protools though and see how I get on and will defo post back to let you know how I get on.

Thanks again,

all the best for 2010

[nst7]

A popular model that works well is the "quad interface" OWC drives from macsales.com.

[srslab]

2009 was a very bad year for seagate. If you are looking at the Freeagent drive they have click issues that result in quick failures. I bought one and within 24 hours it died. I also had the 500GB and 1TB drives that had the firmware issue and lost 4 drives in a week.

I highly recommend the Western Digital MyBook series.