Internal or Firewire audio drive? - 003 w/ Mac Pro

[salmonsound]

My question is: Where should I put my recording audio and sample library - internal SATA or External Firewire or both?

Pro Tools LE 7.4
Digi 003
Mac Pro 1.1 Dual-Core Intel Xeon 2.66 GHz Memory: 5 GB Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz

I just installed Ocean Way Drums (40GB samples) on a 2nd internal SATA drive (7200rpm 3gb per sec 16mb cache) and moved my entire sample library to that drive. I thought I was making things better but I'm not sure.

Performance is fine with no Playback Engine messages, but is slow before and after takes, and saving.

I previously used an external Firewire 400 7200rpm for audio, and had my samples on the system drive. That worked OK for me but slow.

Is there a better way?

[Phil Ogden]

I'd choose internal over FW HD's every time. Whilst I haven't got hard data to hand, there's probably a speed advantage. The main area where FW drives do have an advantage over internal is in mobility. If you need to transfer sessions between systems with any kind of frequency, then that's the way to go.

Having a dedicated sample streaming HD (as well as a dedicated audio and system drives) might help with the loading speed issue you appear to be having. However, it would be worth looking at the patches you're using. Some VI's provide options which use less multi-samples and/or allow these to be streamed from RAM. Worth investigating.

http://www.myspace.com/philogg