raid or other method of achieving redundancy/backup

[charlie_m]

I just recently went to an external drive (for my first few months I was committing the no-no of recording to the system drive - on a laptop no less!). I am running XP on a Toshiba laptop.

Anyway going to a 7200 RPM 320 GB external drive seems to have helped a lot. I might for kicks later replace it with a 10k RPM drive, but really this whole thing got me to thinking about my audio drive and how I can add some redundancy or a backup to my system that isn’t going to take me a lot of time to manage. I’m thinking raid would be a great way to go but then I read that raid is not supported by PTLE… wondering how others have solved this issue. Thanks in advance for any tips.

Charlie

[Obsidian Dragon]

Congratulation on getting that external firewire drive (not USB right?). You are correct in that Protools seems to have problems reocrding and playing back from RAID drives. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm guessing the overhead to read/write the data twice to two different locations on two separate drive hinders the throughput needed for Protools. You can (and should already be doing this) get another drive or at least to DVD-R's and copy/backup your files/sessions to it. This is a separate chore and does not happen at the same time as your recording and mixing.

[charlie_m]

Thanks. Actually my drive supports fw but I was never able to make that work with ptle (suspect fw card compat on my laptop). I run the drive as usb 2.0.

Bummer about the raid. I suppose I'll just do manual backups. I thought raid actually gave you better throughput than a single drive but I could be mistaken on that.

Charlie