External Drive - SSD or Thunderbolt

[JFreak]

Again, folks, pay attention to the INTERNAL performance (as in how little latency, how big throughput) of a drive, *AND* EXTERNAL performance (as in are you using TB or FW or USB or internal SATA or whatever).

If your external performance is better than internal performance, you can just forget about it. It is really the internal performance that matters. You need low latency high throughput drive, period.

[Darryl Ramm]

The drive recommendations I posted have good internal (a good SSD) and external (Thubderbolt) performance. If you have better recommendations for Mac drives please post them.

[JFreak]

That is among the best currently. Whether Thunderbolt or PCIe, it will not limit the best drives out there.

[Oliver M]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

The drive recommendations I posted have good internal (a good SSD) and external (Thubderbolt) performance. If you have better recommendations for Mac drives please post them.

The recommendations you posted are for the wealthy ones.
If you give advise to the average user then consider to not recommend the best possible solutions but those that work without issues and are affordable.

You don't have to use SSD to record to in order to achieve good performance.

To the OP:

Any good, fast 7200 RPM external drive via FireWire 800 will work just fine.

Look out for Western Digital Caviar Black drives. For external enclosures I can recommend the OWC Mercury Elite Pro


Oliver

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Oliver M

The recommendations you posted are for the healthy ones.
If you give advise to the average user then consider to not recommend the best possible solutions but those that work without issues and are affordable.

You don't have to use SSD to record to in order to achieve good performance.

To the OP:

Any good, fast 7200 RPM external drive via FireWire 800 will work just fine.

Look out for Western Digital Caviar Black drives. For external enclosures I can recommend the OWC Mercury Elite Pro


Oliver

.. or the ones who want to be healthiest, or have least chance of running into IO related problems.

Lets add to that if you do want to go to a Firewire 800 drive, it should have a Oxford chipset. Vendors like OWC, Glyph and G-Tech make suitable external drives and will usually state the chipset and/or claim they are suitable for use with Pro Tools. If the MBP has an unused USB 3 port then a USB3 external drive may offer higher performance than FW800 (depending on the specific drive details). If you need FW for an interface I would avoid using it for any disk drives if possible. Avoid even needing to use a thunderbolt to Firewire adapter and just get a USB3 drive (SSD or 7,200 RPM or faster - but be careful many cheap consumer USB drives have junk slow HDDs in them).

If on an older MBP (non retina) my first choice by far would be to replace the optical superdrive with a 2.5" carrier and a 2.5" SATA III drive, preferably a Samsung 840 Evo or Pro, or a modern SATA III 7,200 RPM HDD.

And here Oliver means "look out for WDC Caviar Black" as in they are very good 7,200 rpm HDDs, not look out for them as a problem.

[JFreak]

WDC Caviar Black & OWC enclosure also my recommendation

[ronwasserman]

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?

I'm on a iMac with flash memory so I use the "internal" drive BUT have also used the 256GB Lacie Rugged SSD TB drives which work great!

BTW - Before people chime in about me using the internal flash, I've had zero issues with this. Same on my laptop using internal flash or the other with using the internal SSD drive. All work flawlessly.