Will This External Hard Drive work with Pro Tools?

[90Brownie]

I basically just want to save my sessions on this HD and "Bounce to Disk" on it once in a while.But before I spend the money on it I need to know if it would work with my Pro Tools on Windows XP.Thanks for the help.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer...y/MS2F7080GB8/

[TOM@METRO]

Will it work? It appears so. You will most likely need to format it to NTFS.

[audiogeekzine]

Looks like a good option to me.

Just don't ever use the USB on it because Prolific is THE WORST chipset.

[dvalukis]

Hey all, Forum nub here. Just got PT LE 7.4. Everything is running great, updated RAM on my laptop and things couldn't be better. However, I just purchased an 1 TB external HD from newegg. It's not here yet, so I was researching the set ups for PT's and external HD's. I've been searching all over these and other forums, but there doesn't seem to be a cut and dry answer if my ext. HD will work/or how to correctly set it up. Here's my specs:

Pressario C700 Notebook (Upgraded memory to Kingston HyperX 2GB)
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en...8-3466274.html

MBox 2 Mini/PT 7.4

Western Digital Element 1TB 3.5" Black External Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136321

Roswell 7 Port 2.0 USB Hub
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817182139


In my perfect little world I'll be able to plug my Mini M Box into my USB hub as well as my new HD and just use my external as if it were another internal HD on my laptop.

There just seems to be so much talk of firewire and macs that it's difficult to find out if something will work rather than it being approved by Digi or not.

So do you guys think this will work? If not, maybe help point me in the right direction. Was I too naive to think that a regular 2.0 external would be ok?

[albee1952]

Pro Tools does not work well with USB drives and they are not recommended or supported. The WD's with firewire seem to work good. My choice are the OWC Mercury drives(right side column here
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...teAL/400+USB2/
but they generally need to be re-formatted to NTFS for PC use.

[dvalukis]

Thanks for the reply. I've been reading up on the differences between USB and firewire, storage for PT, etc... I can't find any concrete reason why USB wont work with PT other than people saying that Digidesign doesn't approve of it. I understand that firewire is faster and it is best for digital media usage, but it may just be ok for the small projects that I work on. (4-8 tracks).

Anyways, I already have one ordered on the way and I'll keep a log of problems (if I run into any) and report back here.

Plus my laptop doesn't even have the ability to put in a firewire dock. So I guess I'm actually stuck with USB. Just want to bang my head into a wall.

I thought buying a mini mbox would be a relatively cheap hobby. Now that's an addiction it's getting very costly. Anyone selling a PC?

[TOM@METRO]

I have had small sessions run okay on USB drives, but when I did I considered myself lucky.

As long as you doing it, I hope you’re lucky.

[The Weed]

The major problem with USB for DAW's is throughput. While the burst rate for USB 2.0 is 480 mbs, it's not a sustained rate, so, at times, Pro Tools won't be able to get audio to/from the drive fast enough. Firewire 400 is "slower" than USB 2.0, but has a higher sustained throughput and, therefore, works well with DAW's.

You may get USB to work for a time, but eventually you will have issues. If your laptop has an ExpressCard slot, there are firewire ExpressCards that will work well with Pro Tools.

Cheers,