Use Round Robin for new track allocation?

[ArKay99]

Brand new Mac Pro, twin procs, 12 gig, 1 640gb system drive, 2 1T data drives. OSX 10.6, MBox2 Pro, PT 8.0.3.

I'm a newb with PT. Anyway, I was trying to utilize my 2nd data drive for tracks and saw this little checkbox and thought, "wow, that must be what I'm looking for"... not!

I discovered that I was getting audio, rendering, and fade folders and files on my system drive..., so... I unchecked that, moved my files, and changed the allocation in the dialog. All is cool again...

Question is, does anyone know a way to make this happen without PT using the system drive?

[Slim Shady]

Why? There's no reason to be using Round Robin on a LE system. That being said, if you feel it's necessary for some odd reason, setup your drives accordingly in the workspace browser and you'll be good to go.

[ArKay99]

Originally Posted by Slim Shady

Why? There's no reason to be using Round Robin on a LE system. That being said, if you feel it's necessary for some odd reason, setup your drives accordingly in the workspace browser and you'll be good to go.

Why? Check my post count. I was 'told' when putting this system together to use 2 drives if possible and don't use the system drive to record to. So I bought 2 1T drives.

I used to put PT rigs together back when 888's were the big thing and huge HD's were 250 megs. So track allocation was a big deal.

I don't mind recording to one drive at all. It makes life so much simpler. Thanks.

[appledude]

I believe that it depends on your hard drives, how many tracks and what is the session sampling rate. Here is a page on the glyph site that shows the track count for glyph drives and should be comparable to your drives with the same specs:

http://www.glyphtech.com/support/trackcount.php

For instance on my Glyph 050 I could get 78 tracks at 48kz with not a lot of edits or I could get just 34. More than enough for me. At 96Kz I could get 60 or 16. If you have a session that has a 48 track count (Digi LE max without production toolkit) one drive should be enough to handle it. If not you have to round robin so that the feeds goes to more than one drive to increase your track count. On HD systems running 128K with edits the track count goes way down hence it is more important to round robin on a HD system, but not necessary. If your are charging in a pro studio running HD most likely you will run round robin. The customer would normally bring in a couple of portable drives (normally glyphs) that slide into the system.

If your drives were bought as part of the Mac Pro from Apple they are 7200 rpm that should be good to do video and music. If you want to know their chipset go to the Apple menu chose "about this Mac" and then click on More info. Then look at the specs in the firewire selection. As stated in other posts they should have an oxford chipset and be formatted to HFS+ journaled.

[appledude]

And yes do not use your system drive for recording.

[Eric Seaberg]

Once you've created your session tracks BEFORE you record, open DISK ALLOCATION under SETUP and assign whatever tracks you want to the 2nd drive. Once you save the session they will stay that way.

[albee1952]

Just designate the system drive as T for transfer and Pro Tools won't(can't) record to it. Unless you have 50+ audio tracks, I would not use Round Robin at all.

[ArKay99]

Thanks guys I really appreciate the info.
Although I've gotten close to 48 tracks, I don't see this as going beyond that at all... famous last words I'm sure.

I forgot to add that I'm using LE...