Hard Drive for use with PT HD and MacPro

[skylab001]

Can anybody recommend a good solution. I am upgrading to an HD system with a Macpro and am curious if it is better to go with an internal SATA or external firewire drive for PT to write to. Also do I need 2 drives? I thought with the PT LE music production kit you needed 2 drives to run 48 tracks, is this the case with HD systems? I have thought it would be great to have an external drive bay with removable drives but can't find one that I consider afforadable, sub $400 range.

[Jeremy Mix3000]

SATA drives work fine for me with 70-80 tracks on one drive. The Mac Pro has 4 drive bays so it would be a better choice for recording your audio since everything would be self-contained. I haven't had good success with Firewire drives in general. Anyone have some suggestions for good external drive choices ?

[bpert]

The LaCie drives have always worked pretty well for me. If you treat an external firewire drive more like disposable media (backing up often, and tossing out drives as they fail), you will save yourself alot of anguish. The truth is these drives are so cheap now, that you can have 3 copies of everything for a decent price. When a drive fails, replace it with a new one and you are right back on track!

[tomhartman]

I would definitely get a drive from Other World Computing, and I would use the SATA2 internals. I have a Mac Pro and have all 4 drives installed. I have also had great success with the Other World firewire drives over the years, they run 24/7 here without problems, one or two of them have been for about a year now

I am slowly phasing them out because of the internals however....

TH

[Dutchmuzik]

I use the Wiebetech Traydock, mostly for backups as I prefer to use the internal SATA bus for audio. I have run sessions of the Traydock and it works great, you can install SATA drives in it and run it on Firewire. Check it out here

Traydock

[MARVINBASS]

I use the Glyph GT050Q connected to the FW800 port. These external drives kick ass and are more reliable than LaCie.

http://www.glyphtech.com/site/products/gt050q.html

[MixerGuy]

work off your 2nd SATA drive

backup to firewire

done and done

[skylab001]

Yeah looks like I'm going to go with a second SATA internal.

Does anybody use DVD's as backups or are there problems doing it that way? Seems the easier cheaper method but maybe I'm overlooking something....maybe reliability??

[rob@terra]

I have not had good luck with LaCie

G Technology have been very bullet proof. We have 5 Final Cut workstations and 2 ProTools systems all with various products from them. All are working fine.

Good luck

Rob

[MixerGuy]

Yeah looks like I'm going to go with a second SATA internal.

Does anybody use DVD's as backups or are there problems doing it that way? Seems the easier cheaper method but maybe I'm overlooking something....maybe reliability??

you want to do a smart incremental backup to an external firewire drive frequently - at least once a day, if not more.

why waste all those DVD's, and time...

and if your project gets to be bigger than 4 gigs, you're screwed.