Record to internal or external drive?

[rcook349]

I'll soon have a laptop for my Pro Tools. Do I record to the internal 7200 IDE drive, or is the correct way to record to an external drive? Is this via firewire or some other cable?

Sorry for the extemely basic/stupid question.

[superpenguin79]

preferably you'll want to have a fast enough external drive in this situation via Firewire. However, it is always best to have 2 internal drives on any computer if you get a desktop eventually and set one for applications and the other as your audio drive. I believe the current drive standards are around 5700, but I think there are better ones also. Its been a while since I had to purchase a drive. you definately want to go external though. Goodluck

[casperfun]

pertains to situation. I prefer mobile flexibility. So I partitioned my 4500 speed internal drive. And I record to it without having to lug around a firewire drive that needs to be plugged in. The whole reason why they never made MBOX firewire supposedly so you wont have to plug to a external power supply if you want to record in the middle of nowhere. I assume laptop is for mobile recording of course.

[jre3132]

Yeah, internal or external doedn't really matter, as long as the drive speed is compatible with protools. Just make sure you have a seperate drive to record to. Don't record on the system drive, it will cause the drive to become fragmented and when you defrag you can lose plug-in auths (that aren't on Ilok) and have to go through hoops to get them back.

Not fun, easier to just keep audio seperate.