Why use an external drive?

[kidbristol]

Could someone direct me to an article about the necessity of an external drive for PT? I just went through a big upgrade that has yielded tons of internal drive space...why do I need to push out the boat for yet more hard drive space?

[The Dougfather]

It'd not thst you need more space it's to mske things more efficient and achieve higher track counts....why?

Your internal is used by your OS and other background processes, if Pro Tools and your OS are competeing for HD then your going to get playback errors. It's pretty logical when you think about it.

You need secondary drive depnding on your mac, if you have a mac pro then a secondary internal is better than a firewire drive which would be used with notebooks, imacs etc.

[Mikeren]

Internal or external, the point is to have the streaming record/playback process on a different drive than the one operating the PT program.

An additional internal SATA drive is a great option--or the often recommended external firewire drive that meet Digi specs will do just fine.

A single partitioned drive would not be a good option either, if you follow the logic of it...

MR

[Reb]

You will eventually stress out the internal drive which will lead to failure. It will have to keep jumping back and forth between system stuff and audio stuff...not good. Add as others have said, track count will be much lower.

[albee1952]

Yes indeed, the idea is to use a separate drive. It can be internal(actually the best performance) or external on firewire or eSATA.