Just bought an external firewire drive

[PRS4LIFE]

hey everyone just bought an external firewire drive to use as my audio drive for pro tools le. this one to be exact. hooked it up and powered it on and all is well. windows didnt even need to install anything, just turned it on and it's ready to go. i was reading in the manual that came with it and it said that the drive is formatted to the FAT32 file system. my question is should i reformat it to how digi has it explained in their manual for formatting audio drives?

[jammybastard]

I have that one as well and I reformatted it to NTFS. So far I'm storing files on it, but I haven't tried to read and write sessions to it yet.

[lemix]

PRS4LIFE,
I find it easier to manage partition sizes under XP with NTFS.
Should you need Mac access as well, stay w/FAT 32.

best of luck,
andrew

[Detuned6]

Does that drive have a oxford chipset???

[PRS4LIFE]

i dont if it does or not, tried to find out but i couldnt. looked on WD site and it didnt say anything. my friend has this same drive and told me he hasn't had any problems at all w/ pro tools le.

[Greg M]

I've had one of these drives for a while. Firewire works great for backup and as a recording drive. The USB will only accurately transfer smaller files. With USB, even for backup, large audio files somehow get changed and acquire occasional "static" bursts. When I first got it, I told WD about the problem and they couldn't fix it so they sent me another drive - it did the same thing. So.... works fine for everything using firewire but USB has problems.

Hope this helps,
Greg

[3over3]

There's been a lot of ongoing debate regarding Firewire vs USB. Digidesign don't recommend USB (even 2.0) although every other audio/sequencer manufacturer seems to be fine with it.

On other threads this has been blamed on such issues as Digidesign rarely providing a feature or endorsing technology until it actually works (for instance, plug-in delay compensation and offline bouncing, which we still don't have in LE land, but which are present but only nearly work in, say, Logic Pro).

More practically, two issues seem to point against USB - it's believed that USB is excellent at short bursts of data, but its sustained data rate is not as good as Firewire and that USB needs additional CPU capacity in order to work where Firewire includes its own hardware to control the system, thus giving you more CPU for plug-ins etc.

Some people claim to use USB and have no issues, but if you are having trouble use a recommended Firewire configuration. See the specs here.