MBox / Firewire / PC questions....

[dchband]

Hi! I'm anxiously waiting for the MBox to come out on PC, but I have some questions about how the set up works.

1) I understand that a firewire drive is highly recommended. Is it best to record *directly* to your firewire drive?

2) My computer is a Pentium 3, 866 from Dell. If I buy a firewire card and drive, will it be readable by my friend's Mac G4?

My concern is that I will go upgrading to Win XP, buy a firewire card and drive, purchase the MBox, but then it will be too slow to *write* to the firewire drive because the MBox uses USB.

Anyone have any thoughts or information on these concerns? Thank you!

David

[Bastiaan]

Firewire seems to be a nice way of adding harddrives to your system, but for interchanging, you can also use cd-rw's or cd-r's.

[minimoog]

the MBox is only responsible for audio I/O, two channels of which should not stress your system too much.

who said you need a firewire drive? the fastest chipsets on the market only support UDMA 33, which is nowhere near as faast as most onboard controllers. if you want to take your stuff to your friends place, however, a firewire drive might be the best option. just be sure to format it FAT32 and make sure the G4 has PC Exchange enabled. (it's part of the Base Extension Set from OS 8.6 onward so it should be there unless the extensions folder has been butchered.) also make sure your firewire drive enclosure uses the Oxford 911 chipset - that's very important for reliable operation. they usually cost a little more than anything else but believe me, it's money well spent.