Macbook pro with 002 (firewire connection)

[Nicky2]

wondering if there is any issue with this setup.....
I'm going from a macbook pro (new 15 inch I7) firewire 800 to an external firewire multi port drive (Ministack V3 from OWC). I'm connecting from the mac's 800 port to the 800 port on the external drive, then out a 400 port to my 002.
I've read where you should use a firewire drive that has 2 400 ports, and use an adaptor cable to go from the computer to the harddrive.
Is it ok that I'm connecting the mac 800 to 800, and then 400 out to the 002?

Also, the external drive has a usb hub built in. Can this potentially cause conflicts?

I have been up and running with this computer for just a few weeks. I am getting occasional "increase buffer size errors" (trying to run at 128) and occasional "running out of CPU errors". Running sessions with only virtual tracks, no audio, with Ivory, Stylus, and Trillian. I thought with this computer, I wouldn't be seeing these errors. Is it possibly related to the way I have the drive routed to the 002?
thanks!

[Nicky2]

also, would it be better or worse to go 800 from the computer to the external drive, and then 800 off the drive to the 400 port on the 002 using an adaptor? (instead of out the 400 port on the drive).

[Nicky2]

another question-tech support at OWC suggested I format the external drive as "Apple Partition map". Is this necessary?

[nst7]

This should work for your setup. The issue of keeping everything at 400 applies mainly to the mbox 2 pro.

I have an Imac and have successfully run 800 through 3 hard drives, before going 400 to my 003 rack.

However, you may be having issues because of the virtual instruments you're running. Those are seriously power hungry instruments. If you can, as you finish working with each one, record it to an audio track, then deactivate the instrument track.

Protools has never been very strong about running multiple virtual instruments at one time, especially at a lower buffer like that.

[Nicky2]

thanks for your reply-I know the instruments I'm using are pretty cpu intensive....I was hoping that with this new computer (I7 processor, 4 gigs of ram), that I wouldn't be seeing error messages regarding playing virtual instruments. I guess I need ways to optimize my system. The folks at Spectrasonics told me I could put their samples on my internal 7200 drive, that I wouldn't see any performance difference if I moved them to an external drive. Do you all agree? Or should I have them on an external drive?

[nst7]

There's been some debate about this. Most companies seem to recommend putting the samples on an external drive. I know Synthogy strongly recommends it for Ivory. In fact, they recommend having it's own hard drive separate from other samples, but this is not practical for many people.

[GW]

Yes, I would mainly look at Ivory being the troublesome part of this setup. Putting the Ivory library on the FW800 external disc (if its 7.200 like Iomega) and record to another USB external disc may be a temporary solution (didn't do much for me thou). I've been playing with the idea of putting a Flash-HD in the cardslot of the MacBook and run my Ivory from there... Just sharing my ideas on the matter. The other two plugins are another matter, since they run in 64-bit mode and would benefit from more RAM, but I haven't had any trouble with Trilian.

[nst7]

Well, via firewire, you can daisy chain more than one drive before the 002. As I mentioned, I've done 3 drives and the 003 daisy chained with no problem. So you can have different drives for audio vs. samples.