Hard Drive Setup

[rfrance]

According to the Setup Guide, recording to your system drive is not recommended.

Are there any issues with partitioning a single drive and having a 40GB C:\ drive for the OS, Pro Tools, and paging and then a second partition as a 250GB D:\ drive?

or do you need to have a completely seperate physical hard drive?

[fridrikur]

The audio drive needs to be on a separate partition, and that is the case you are describing, so I would say it is ok. However it is best if it is partioned as a primary partionon and not as a locigal partition, if possible.
It is a lot easier to use two harddrives and partition one as a primary partion for audio than just using one harddisk though.
Good luck!

[rfrance]

It's a Laptop so I only have the one hard drive internally - but -

Would it be better to have an external usb hard drive to record the audio too?

Or

What about setting up a 64GB USB Flash Drive to be the System Drive for bootup and Vista and then use the internal drive for audio?

[TOM@METRO]

No no no,
Do not use a separate partition on a system drive. This is technically worse that recording onto you system drive directly. You must have a physically separate qualified hard drive for audio.


IMPORTANT! You MUST use a secondary hard drive (not your main OS drive) for recording and playback of audio in Pro Tools. Recording or playback from the OS drive is known to be problematic and the cause of many different error types. If you are using your system drive and encountering errors, the first thing you should do is get a compatible drive. USB drives are not supported and are known to be problematic, so please do not use them with Pro Tools. If you're recording or playing back from a USB drive and are getting errors in Pro Tools, please switch to using a compatible external firewire drive or internal SATA/ATA/IDE drive and disconnect the USB drive.

[fridrikur]

Originally Posted by rfrance

It's a Laptop so I only have the one hard drive internally

Sorry about overlooking that important detail. I would suggest buying an external firewire harddisk then and use that as an audio drive. One with an oxford (911) chipset. But on a fw400 and not a fw800 bus.
By the way Solid state disks or usb flash drives are not qualified to be used with PT.

[rfrance]

OK - so I am still a bit confused on one thing. Before I go out and buy a firewire drive, it appears you are saying not record or playback to a flash drive and that PT is not compatible with USB flash drives - which appears to be talking about record and playback also.

But I can make a 64GB Flash Drive the System Drive and run the OS from there thus leaving the internal drive completely seperate and availble as a logical drive. I've done this quite a bit with training machines in my day job.

So, would Pro Tools run in this type of a scenario?

[rfrance]

I already have a feeling that the answer above is no - but I would like to know for sure and just in case and in order to save time -

I can't seem to find anything with oxford 911, but I did find this with oxford 934: MiniPro 2.5-inch FireWire USB External Hard Drive Enclosure

There is not a firewire port on my laptop but I do have a PCMCIA slot and a Best Connectivity 1394a Firewire 400 PCMCIA Card - but I have not tried it with Vista before.

Assuming there are drivers available for the PCMCIA card, would this suffice?

[scenicrecords]

I went thru a lot of hoops trying to get my system stable, and I would recommend that you only use drives and hardware that is approved by Digidesign.

For laptops, the only card that is qualified is this: http://www.siig.com/ViewProduct.aspx?pid=1038

Read more here:
http://www3.digidesign.com/index.cfm...4&itemid=23113

With my laptop, I use the Glyph 050Q, and the SIIG NN-EC2012-S1 and it is stable. Adding non-recommended or non-qualified parts to your system may have you running in circles with problems.

[fridrikur]

It is a good thing that you do not have a firewire port on your labtop since you need to use a firewireport with a texas instrument chipset, so you can always install that in your pcmia card.
About the system drive and PT I am affraid I do not know. My focus has always been the drive that PT records to, that being the audio drive...
The lacie d2 quadra has an oxford chipset. I believe it is Oxford 11, which is also qualified with pro tools systems.
http://archive.digidesign.com/compat...g/firewire.cfm
According to this oxford911 and oxford912 are supported with fw400, and
Oxford 922 is for fw800 drives.
http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=147797
QUote:
M-Audio firewire interfaces do not support FW800 connections anywhere in the chain. If you only have a firewire 800 port on your computer, you can try using a FW800 to FW400 adapter cable however keep in mind that this is not the ideal solution and may still be problematic. A better solution is to get a FW400 expresscard (for laptops) or PCI/PCIe FW400 card (for desktops) and connect your interface to that. The Siig 2 Port card (link to expresscard or PCIe versions) has been shown to be suitable for this situation.

[fridrikur]

Go with the Glyph drive instead. I just learned that my lacie d2 quadra does not have the Oxford chipset. This is perhaps why I have been getting click and pops using PT 8.3.
The lacie d2 quadra (in my case) uses the LSI chipset.