hard drive speed

[vertaco]

Many PC notebooks have hard drive speeds that barely reach 4200 rpm or 5200 rpm. It's also known that PTF is fully compatible with 7200 rpm hard drives. So, is it possible (or reasonable) to try to use PTF on a notebook limited to 4200 or 5200 rpm? Will it work properly? What kind of side-effect could occur?

[audiotracker]

It'll work on a system with a 5400RPM hardrive(I have that hardrive speed, but I've optimized my computer for audio recording), I wouldn't recommend anything less than 5400RPM(mostly has to do with access time/speed...usually <10msec is recommended)

[vertaco]

Well, thank you for your advice. I'm about to think that I'd rather buy an external hard drive for my future notebook... In that case, would it be better to choose an USB hard drive, a firewire one, or to buy a SCSI card and use a SCSI connection? By the way, is PTF "firewire compatible"?

[audiotracker]

Most people do not recommend using a notebook for audio recording because of different compatibility issues(and ProTools Free has enough of those with normal desktop systems), but if you are going to hook up a faster SCSI hardrive to it, you should be okay(but there would probably still be a soundcard issue...). As for "firewire" compatible, that you would have to check with the Digidesign people, unless someone else already has an answer.