IBM Deskstar Ultra ATA100 drives?

[Ron Streicher]

I just purchased and assembled a Powerbook G4 with an MBOX and IBM Deskstar ATA100 drives (40 and 80 GB) in removeable Firewire systems from Granite Digital. (Drive specs: 7200rpm, 8.5ms seek time, ATA-100 interface, max recording density 524 KBPI, transfer rate 592 MB/S) According to the specs, this system SHOULD operate properly. HOWEVER ...

During my first two attempts to use this system to record a full length rehearsal here at the Aspen Music Festival, after about half an hour the system began producing and recording loud "snapping" sounds which would go away only if I quit ProTools. (It continued even if I stopped recording.)

Does anyone know whether this might be a hard-drive-related probem, or is it system or setup related?

Please respond directly to my e-mail address (as well as this forum) because I need to know as soon as possible. There is another dress rehearsal tonight.

Thank you so very much for your help.
[email protected]

[where02190]

Sounds cabling related, perhaps a bad calbe on a phantom line. Try to isolate it to specific inputs.

[Ron Streicher]

I FOUND THE ANSWER: There are upgrades for BOTH the MBOX Firmware and the DigiDesign USB Driver extension. Both can be found on the Digidesign website for downloading. The USB Driver is version 1.0.1 and the Firmware upgrade is version 1.8

Installation of both solved the problems I was having. The IBM Drives work very well, indeed.