Yet Another FW Drive Question

[cooksie]

I'm a recent MBox purchaser, and though it seems like this question has come up repeatedly, I can't find a satisfactory and up-to-date answer by searching the old posts.

So here goes: I need to buy a Firewire Drive.

My computer is a PowerBook G4 15". It has a Firewire 800 port.

I know that I need to by a 7200 rpm drive with an Oxford 911 chipset to be compatible with Protools LE 6.4.

But as far as I can tell, the Oxford 911 chipset is exclusively associated with Firewire 400 drives. Every Firewire 800 drive I can find has either the Oxford 922 or Oxford 912 chipset. The one I have my eye on, a LaCie D2, uses Oxford 912.

So: Does this mean that I'm stuck buying a Firewire 400 drive in order for it to be Protools compatible? Or are there Firewire 800 drives with the Oxford 911 chipset and I just can't find them? Or are Oxford 912 or Oxford 922 chipsets secretly compatible with Protools and they're just not telling us in the compatibility docs for some reason? (The compatibility docs actually say "Oxford 911 or comparable"--maybe the 912 or 922 chipsets are "comparable"?)

If the answer is: You have to buy a Firewire 400 drive with a 911 chipset, should I maybe wait a couple months and hope for an update that would make Protools LE 6.4 compatible with Firewire 800 and the 912 or 922 chipset?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Dale-c]

There are no compatibility issues with drive chipsets as far as I know. I have used many drives to record to, even my iPod. It is just that the Oxford 911 has the best performance so it is what is supported by Digi. Oxford 922 is basically the same thing but it is the chipset for Firewire 800. If you get the 800 drive you will be fine.
Pro Tools will allow you to even record to the internal laptop drive, it just isn't recommended because of the low performance but I even do this when I need to do onsite recording and I am only doing a couple of tracks