[Phil O'Keefe]

Congrats on the new HDD! It should make your system even more powerful and flexible.

The "normal" way is with the smaller HDD (ie, your 30 GB) as the "C" or system drive. This will hold all of your programs (including Pro Tools), and can also be used as a additional "backup" drive for secondary backup copies - 1st Law of DIgital Backups: If it doesn't exist in AT LEAST two places, then it doesn't EXIST! [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

The larger ("D", ie, your new 80 GB) HDD is the "audio and PT data files only" drive. Set PT to use this as your default recording drive. You can back up from this drive to CD-R's and to the "C" drive. If the drive gets full, just backup and delete what you're not currently working on. With a FAST burner like a Plextor or Sony 40 - 48X, you can back up a typical project in 5 - 10 minutes - even if it needs two CD-R's to store everything.

A 80 GB drive can hold a LOT of data... but even that will eventually fill up. That 30 GB drive is probably going to have some free space available too - programs aren't THAT big - at least compared to multitracked 24 bit digital audio sessions. I run a 60 GB C and 80 GB D, and back up from the D drive to the C drive and CD-R's I occasionally (throughout the day as I'm working) backup / save the session to the C drive, as well as to the D drive - that way, even if one of the drives crashed and burned, I'd still have access to the latest work we did, and will have only lost what was done since the latest backup. When I'm done with the project, I back it up on to CD-R's, but I may go to a DVD burner and removeable IEEE 1394 drive soon for compatability reasons.

This is the "traditional" approach, its well organized and it works well for many people (myself included), but it's not the "only" way - use what works for you and makes sense to you - just remember to record to that D drive instead of the C, and you'll make things easier on the whole system. And back your data up.

Digidesign recommends placing the C drive and D drive on the same 80 wire / 40 pin IDE cable, with the C drive set as Master (at the end of the cable) and the D drive set as Slave (in the middle of the cable), and with that cable plugged into the mobo's Primary IDE connector. You would then install any CD/Rom's or CD'RW drives on the mobo's Secondary IDE connector n a similar manner. Make sure DMA is enabled for ALL drives.

Some mobos get even better results when a Promise TX2 controller card is used, with each drive (C and D) connected, via their own cable, to the two ports on the Promise controller, and the mobo's standard IDE connectors being used only for the CD drives.

When you format the new drive, FAT 32 or NTFS really won't make a HUGE difference. FWIW, I run NTFS on all my drives (Win XP Home OS) and it works fine. You can partition that 80 GB down to four 20 GB drives, which can make organization and defrags a bit easier and faster.

Well, that should cover it... let me know if you have any other questions, and good luck.