Retrofitting an external hard drive

[sberg]

I've Been having fun with Pro Tools LE and an mbox for a few years now. Got a new computer recently with Windows 7 and installed Pro Tools LE v. 8.04 on the system drive, it's been working well but as that hard drive slowly fills up little problems are beginning to develop. So I want to get an external hard drive (it's a laptop with no room for a second internal drive) and do this right. Initial research raises a preliminary question:

I have seen a number of entries in this forum to the effect that Pro Tools doesn't work very well on a USB hard drive and insisting that people use Firewire hard drives. Hate to say it folks, but with the advent of USB 3 you're not going to be seeing computers with Firewire ports (mine doesn't have one and I'm not real inclined to spend a bunch of money retrofitting it for an obsolete technology, which is what Firewire now is). So the question is, is Avid working on a new version of PT 8 that works with USB? Does 8.05 address this?

[JMS40]

You see so much negative in the archives about USB because there's more than a decade of posts where USB wasn't supported. The change in Avid's advice came with Win 7 architecture. Prior to 7, yes, Firewire was king and USB, unreliable. With Win 7, USB is preferred. So, if you're using PT 8 with Win 7, you're fine with USB. PT 8 with XP, stick with Firewire or eSATA.

[sberg]

That's excellent, thanks for clearing that up.