New Mac book Pro with FireWire?

[SongWritingMIAMI]

I am purchasing the following MAC,
and I am coming over from 5 years on the PC side
running PTLE.... Those mac commercials finally
convinced me.!


Mac Book Pro
Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB Memory
250GB hard drive1
SD card slot
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics

I will be using the Lacie Rugged Firewire Drive
as the external audio drive, it is firewire 800,
but only 5400 rpm instead of 7200rpm

I will be running the latest version of PTLE 8.X

I have the USB Mbox currently, and
can pick up a MBox2 Firewire Pro for a few hundred
bucks... I would like to know if this will work correctly
with the external firewire drive using the same BUS?

Also, do I need to buy the firewire/mbox2 right away,
or will I be able to use the original Mbox/Usb....

I am trying to get the most stable PTLE recording
environment going...

Thanks in advance for your time and expertise...

[flommer]

I will be using the Lacie Rugged Firewire Drive
as the external audio drive, it is firewire 800,
but only 5400 rpm instead of 7200rpm

That is definitely not a good idea. 7200 RPM is pretty important

The USB Mbox will peacefully coexist with a FW drive.

The Mbox 2 Pro will also work, but care needs to be taken in getting the right drive and chaining correctly.. DO a search on the forum. Millions of threads about this...

An advantage of the MBP you are speccing, is that if you do have FW bus issues, then these are often solved by adding a FW bus express card, which gives you additional FW bus throughput

[SongWritingMIAMI]

Yah, I didn't think the 5400rpm would be ideal
for larger track counts...

I'll give it a test when I get the mac
and see how it works out, but I will
start my hunt for a good external
7200rpm drive..

[SoundWrangler]

FWIW, I have been recording/mixing many sessions on the 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro with 9-10 tracks or so (24-bit, both 44 and 48K sample rates) using the internal 5400 hard drive, with no problems at all. I was kinda surprised myself; had been planning on always lugging an external drive; but no. For sessions with a couple dozen tracks or more, yeah, I would want to use an ext. 7200 rpm FW drive.