external hard drive set up with Pro Tools
 

I just purchased an external Seagate 300 GB USB 2.0/Firewire drive for my Apple Powerbook G4 w/40GB HD laptop. I have MAC OS 10.2.8.

I am about to hook up this hard drive and wondering if I should go Firewire which is rated at 400 Mbits/sec or USB 2.0 which is rated at 480 Mbits/sec? I would think USB 2.0 would be better because of the 80 Mbits/sec but the hard drive manual states that, "BounceBack Express" does not support the pushbutton backup feature for a Mac OS that is using a USB interface?

I am also planning on leaving the application files on my internal HD and the Pro Tools session files my external. Should I do this with my other multimedia programs as well?....iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, etc....?

Also wondering if I should partition the external drive when i set it up because it's so big?

any advice would be appreciated!

Re: external hard drive set up with Pro Tools
 

I think the 480mbps with USB on a mac isnt strictly true. I've found firewire to be a lot faster than USB 2 despite the fact on paper it should be faster than firewire. Even things like USB 2 pen drives on a mac are painfully slow.

Also, i've always found keeping sessions on external drives far better than keeping them internal, especially when using video editing apps.

Regards

PS: Partitioning an external drive will only help you when trying to organise your files, it has no benfit on performance.

Re: external hard drive set up with Pro Tools
 

Thanks Dougfather,
I think I'm gonna do the Firewire too.

The external hard drive manual says I have to use "Apple Disk Utility" using one of the Mac OS format types before using it w/my Mac. I couldn't find Disk Utility anywhere, so I did a search in Help and just clicked on "open Disk Utility for me." I clicked on the external hard drive I want to format. There's four tabs, Information, First Aid, Erase, Partition and RAID. I assume I just click on the one that says "erase" and choose "Mac OS extended" for the "Vollume Format?"

thanks again.