what kind of external hard drive for protools ?

[rpb1966]

I use 2 Oxford 912 FW800 drives, one for Pro Tools/Audio and one for everything else, they run well, I have not really had any problems them, well accept my 1.5 TB drive which died after one day, but that was replaced and this one works fine.

[SickTheory]

I personally would Stay away from the WD MYBOOK external hard drives because I just had one go up. It hit the floor about 7 months before but for it to worked 7 months and then all of a sudden develop issues where it will be scene by the computer for about 10 minutes and all of a sudden error is not good.

Now, for those who say I shouldnt have dropped it, your right. If it broke then I would have no problem - 7 months later is an issue which means something else cooky happened.

I lucked up and my Dell has Esata, the advantage over Firewire and USB2 is simply speed.

USB 1.1 – 15 Mbps
FireWire (1394a) – 400 Mbps
USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps
FireWire 800 (1394b) – 800 Mpbs
SATA 1.5 – 1.5 Gbps
SATA 3.0 – 3.0 Gbps

I would look at Apricorn Aegis, Toshiba makes a 1 TB External hard drive but not sure how fast the drive is, and Fantom makes a 2 TB External hard drive that seems to be pretty good.

[albee1952]

Better advice could come from knowing what your computer is. For instance, if its a desktop PC or Mac Pro, I would always recommend more internal drives(7200 rpm SATA) as that will get the best performance, and cost the least. I run 4 internal drives and leave my externals to transfers and backups. I rarely(if ever) actually RUN a session from an external drive anymore. If you have an eSATA port, that is the next best thing as that will perform the same as internal SATA(all other things being equal). Having an iMac modded to have 2 internal drives, and/or an eSATA port is also a good idea(its easy to find a USB optical drive). Firewire is my 3rd choice(and USB2 drives for Windows 7 only). No matter what route you take, BACK IT UP!!!!