External Drive - SSD or Thunderbolt

[jgiannis]

Hi all.

In PT10, instructions say to record to an external drive (7200 rpm) with a FireWire cable. They said Thunderbolt and SolidState drives were not supported.

Just wondering if either (1) Thunderbolt hard drives and/or (2) SolidState hard drives are now tested/supported with PT11?

Also, does anyone have a recommendation for an external drive to use?

[sk8te4free7]

currently with pro tools 10 & 11.. I'm using a 5400rpm, 500gb hdd as a 2nd drive (as backup) on my macbook. Currently I have a SSD as my main drive. I don't see why it wouldn't work but i use USB or firewire

[Southsidemusic]

Hi

If you are recording to the 5400rpm drive you are gonna have issues for sure as Avid states a minimum of 7200rpm. The drive you have is way to slow to use for anything related to PT so a 7200rpm system OS drive minimum and a 7200rpm recording drive minimum. Preferably an SSD Samsung Pro 840/EVO for both but definately NO green or blue spinning drive. If you are gonna use a 7200rpm you need atleast an WDC Black 64MB cache 9ms and 1-3 TB. Never ever buy any green drive thinking you save power with them nor a blue drive as they are crapware and will cause all kinds of issues with PT,

Best Regards
Christopher

PS. Those recomendations are old and not valid anymore. PT supports both SSD And Thunderbolt casings/drives and prefer that. You can also use a USB3 drive if you know whats inside it but don't buy any WD PASSPORT drives etc as they are alow and causes issues.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by jgiannis

Hi all.

In PT10, instructions say to record to an external drive (7200 rpm) with a FireWire cable. They said Thunderbolt and SolidState drives were not supported.

Just wondering if either (1) Thunderbolt hard drives and/or (2) SolidState hard drives are now tested/supported with PT11?

Also, does anyone have a recommendation for an external drive to use?

What exactly are you reading that is telling you this?

What exact date code/model Mac are you using?

And you don't need an *external* drive, you *do* need a dedicated audio/session drive. If you have a free internal SATA (or SAS port etc.) then, stick a dedicated audio/session drive inside the computer.

SSDs have been officially supported by Avid with Pro Tools for quite some time, starting with Pro Tools 10. Avid just says you can use any SSD, in practice SSD performance varies widely, for a SATA SSD I recommend Samsung 840 Pro or Evo drives.

Thunderbolt drives are the a great choice. If you need an external drive on a Mac a Thunderbolt SSD drive offers the best performance (raw speed plus the ability to support TRIM that helps may SSD drives sustained write performance).

There are many threads on DUC discussion recommended external Thunderbolt SSD drives. Like the Lacie Rugged, Lacie Little Big Disk and many options of installing your own SSD in Thunderbolt docks. A search will find those, its pointless to keep posting the same info.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by sk8te4free7

currently with pro tools 10 & 11.. I'm using a 5400rpm, 500gb hdd as a 2nd drive (as backup) on my macbook. Currently I have a SSD as my main drive. I don't see why it wouldn't work but i use USB or firewire

That is a pretty confusing post. You are recording to the system SSD? (maybe a PCIe SSD) or to the external 5,400 rpm drive? Recording the the external 5,400 rpm drive is likely to be much worse than recoding to the system SSD.

And as always... you can record to just about any slow old disk and get away with it if you are doing simple enough stuff. The question is how many tracks (mono/stereo) at what sample rate and with what plugins and VIs operating. Even with fast PCie SSDs on the latest Macs you can still trip up recording to the system/boot SSD. It all depends on what you are doing, and the general recommendation not to set up systems this way still applies even with SSD.

[sk8te4free7]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

That is a pretty confusing post. You are recording to the system SSD? (maybe a PCIe SSD) or to the external 5,400 rpm drive? Recording the the external 5,400 rpm drive is likely to be much worse than recoding to the system SSD.

And as always... you can record to just about any slow old disk and get away with it if you are doing simple enough stuff. The question is how many tracks (mono/stereo) at what sample rate and with what plugins and VIs operating. Even with fast PCie SSDs on the latest Macs you can still trip up recording to the system/boot SSD. It all depends on what you are doing, and the general recommendation not to set up systems this way still applies even with SSD.

i have two drives in my macbook pro. I'm using a datadoubler to use the 5400rpm HDD as my audio/storage drive. My SSD only has the programs installed so its like i'm using an external hard drive but internally. it works perfectly find for me. I'm using at least 3 plugins at once with about 8 to 15 tracks at once but i'm not doing this as a profession. More like just tracking for my band and extract the wave files to send to a professional for mixing/mastering. For my situation it works flawlessly but of course its not the perfect musician setup lol

[Darryl Ramm]

OK good to know, and if it works it works. And you know you have an under spec drive so if you to run into problems you know one thing to suspect. Pro Tools 10 and 11 have gotten better at disk IO so that helps. I also like the older MBP and the ability to put drives in the optical bay (Samsung SSDs in my case). Sure beats messing with cables and external boxes.

[jgiannis]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

What exactly are you reading that is telling you this?

What exact date code/model Mac are you using?

And you don't need an *external* drive, you *do* need a dedicated audio/session drive. If you have a free internal SATA (or SAS port etc.) then, stick a dedicated audio/session drive inside the computer.

SSDs have been officially supported by Avid with Pro Tools for quite some time, starting with Pro Tools 10. Avid just says you can use any SSD, in practice SSD performance varies widely, for a SATA SSD I recommend Samsung 840 Pro or Evo drives.

Thunderbolt drives are the a great choice. If you need an external drive on a Mac a Thunderbolt SSD drive offers the best performance (raw speed plus the ability to support TRIM that helps may SSD drives sustained write performance).

There are many threads on DUC discussion recommended external Thunderbolt SSD drives. Like the Lacie Rugged, Lacie Little Big Disk and many options of installing your own SSD in Thunderbolt docks. A search will find those, its pointless to keep posting the same info.

I am running a MBP 2012 Non-Retina.

I heard this info from a Lynda.com Pro Tools course called "Connecting your Pro Tools system." It is a PT10 course. A link to the video is below. You cannot watch it if you do not have an account, but the transcript is there.

http://www.lynda.com/Pro-Tools-tutor...3/96965-4.html

Here's a portion of the transcript:

"If you have an external hard drive to record audio on to, plug that in first, plug in the power, and turn it on, then connect it to your computer. You can record to several different types of external hard drives, including eSATA, USB on a Windows system, or FireWire on a Mac system.

You can also record to SATA or SAS internal hard drives if they have the speed of 7200 RPM or more. Thunderbolt and SSD drives have not been officially supported by Avid at the time of this recording, but will likely be supported soon. Note that slower hard drive systems such as USB hard drives and RAID systems can be used with Pro Tools HDX and Pro Tools with the Complete Production Toolkit, because these systems load all the audio for a session into your computers RAM, and thus the speed of the drive does not come into play."

Thanks!

[JFreak]

Don't get confused.

There are two kinds of drives, HDD's (spinning magnetic disc) and SSD's (flash storage without moving parts). Then there are certain interfaces (PCIe, SATA, IDE, FW400, FW800, USB, USB2, USB3, Thunderbolt1, Thunderbolt2) that you can use to connect that drive to the computer.

So there are two "speeds" to consider.

First, the internal speed. If the drive is a spinner, then the rotational speed 7200rpm, for example) determines the level of latency that drive suffers before it can begin streamin data. Avid has said long ago that spinners need to be 7200rpm or faster, so you can forget 5400rpm or Green drives. SSd's don't have moving parts so the latency is a non-issue. Drive throughput on the other hand determines how many tracks it can read and write before problems occur, but that number is quite high.

Second, the external speed. The way you connect your drive to your computer is important because if your drive's internal performance is 1000MB/s and you connect it using USB2, then your computer can only use 35MB/s or so. Thunderbolt and PCIe help here, but that won't make the internal speed any faster. Bottom line: external speed should be greater than internal speed.

[Darryl Ramm]

Well thanks for the source, but all that is about two generations of Pro Tools out of date, hope you did not pay much for being given such old information. And on the other hand they do warn you about it being valid at the time the video as made. You should be looking at Avid's own system requirements etc. But even they are confusing for newer users.

For any internal SATA audio/session drive I would get a Samsung 840 Evo or Pro on a PC or Mac.

For any audio/session external drive for a modern Mac I would get a Thunderbolt SSD like drives from Lacie or build my own using a Samsung 840 drive.

For any audio/session drive on a PC I'd be looking at USB3 or eSATA SSD.