OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives?
 

Has anyone tried an OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro drive with a Factory 003? This drive uses RAID 0 to improve performance and OWC says that it is the best drive that they have for audio production and they also state "All Mercury Elite Models are tested and fully suitable for Audio/Video." But Digi says that you can't use RAID drives. Maybe they don't mean RAID 0, though. Other iterations of RAID have a performance hit due to the duplication of data. RAID 0 doesn't duplicate data, but instead increases performance by striping data onto two separate drives, effectively doubling throughput. So will it work?

Re: OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives?
 

Probably not. When DIGI says they don't support RAID, that means all versions of RAID. Maybe you can reformat as JBOD? Their single(non0RAID) firewire drives work great with Protools.

Re: OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives?
 

I've got one of these drives at home, so I could probably test it tonite and let you know.

Re: OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives?
 

Sorry, but even a hardware RAID drive won't work for recording in Pro Tools.

Re: OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives?
 

Even if it would work, I would recommend against using it. I have one for my time machine drive and it is quite noticeably loud. It would definitely be an issue if recording in the same room as the computer. I turn it off when using mics. My imac is much quieter than either of my dual drive enclosures. my old maxtor single drive is much quieter. I think it has something to do with the controller that splits the data between the drives because it sounds much more angry than other drives. When my power supply failed i tried to replace it with the single drive unit, but it didn't happen. I would recommend only buying single enclosure drives.

Re: OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives?
 

The cool thing about these drive cases is that you get hardware mirroring built in (or other forms of RAID) - good for auto-backups.

Re: OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives?
 

question for mr rallycars: what interface/external drive combo are you using with the imac? i've always used a tower machine with multiple drive bays inside, and it needs updating, i've been considering the big imacs as i can't afford a mac pro at all. but i use the mbox2 pro, which is firewire and generally has problems with external drives....