Western Digital My Book 500G External

[pinstudio]

Hi there,
2 questions...

Anyone using or heard anything about this hard drive?

Is 500 too big to be working off of?

thanks in advance,

Allan

[timebandit]

I don't know anything about that drive specifically. It should be fine as long as it meets the minimum rotation speed requirement (at least 7200 RPM) and it is connected through firewire. Check the digi drive requirements here.

There is no reason why a 500GB drive should cause any problems due to size.

Hope that helps.

Tom

[Camilo Toledo]

An average song, using 32 tracks, 24/44.1, is about 800 mb to 1gb heavy. If that's is going to be your dedicated audio drive, you can easily save about 500 songs. You will have a lot of room and a lot of recording to do man, wow!.

Is there an specific reason why you need such an large drive?

[albee1952]

I trust that it has firewire on it(as USB is not supported). If you go with it, I would partition it in half for "housekeeping".

[IntelDoc]

I have their terrabyte one and a 750 gig one and am able to mix 60 tracks plus with it no prob via USB. I am HD though too....

Doc

[Camilo Toledo]

750 gb... man! are you recording 96Khz? or more?


off topic...

Nice going Doc... your set up is great. HD must be super nice. Hey... I'm going to sell secret goverment stuff to a mad man and maybe then I'll move to another state and get my own HD system...

[IntelDoc]

hahahah no, but use it to store sessions, etc. Works fine with USB and even have it hooked up to my usb on my monitor that then goes to the system.

BTW: Sold my house in DC that is why I went HD. Plus I got stellar deals on the stuff.

Great setup though and everything is patchless. 32 in and 48 outs so it is all hard wired into Pro Tools and labelled as a insert point. Pretty slick really.



Doc

[Bob L]

Allan:
I'm using a 500GB one for storage via FW400, but I did run a quick test to make sure it was usable as a session drive. Note that there are several Editions, the major diff being the number and kind of interfaces. I think mine is the Pro Edition (silver, round front panel button) and has USB2 and FW400/800. Intuitively, the more interfaces, the higher the price.

I'm running this drive as storage and a Micronet 160 GB FW400/USB1 as the session drive from a Siig 3 port card, which had been Digi approved; I think they're discontiued at this point.

I have had some issues with the WD driver not working if the Micronet isn't powered up before startup. In order to regain control of the WD, the drivers have to be reinstalled from the WD drive, and that has to be done by hooking up USB2 without the FW, then removing the USB2 and hooking up FW again. This is a complete PITA and I'm unsure why this happens, but I've got this down to a 5 minute operation, since I've done it enough times now. Also, know that the WD powers up and down intelligently IF the "Buttons and Lights" driver is installed properly (two device drivers have to load). Also note that neither the FW driver nor the USB driver live on the disc that ships with the unit, said disc apparently having only Retrospect on it which I don't use.

[vocalvoodoo]

I'm using a 250gig, which is quite small actually, but it has worked fine.

j