firewire or internal drive w/002?

[jacko32]

hi all....i have been building a PC and gearing up for my soon to be purchase of a 002. I Have an 80 gig 7200rpm internal hard drive which i have my operating system and soon to be Pro tools software loaded on(but nothing else will be on this drive, strictly a PT computer) My other option is that i have an 80 gig 7200rpm firewire drive that i could use soley as an audio drive.My question is: which one should i use. i have read some people say it matters not and others say you need an audio only drive to use with pro tools. Would there be any cons to using the firewire drive? Also, i built a pentium 4 PC at 1.8 ghz. I noticed on digidesigns website that it said P4 @ 2.0 ghz for the 002. DId i screw up....i cant imagine a 1.8ghz machine not working. I also have 512 Mbs of ram on the PC. thanks in advance.

[where02190]

digidesing recommends a second drive for audio files, as do many software manufacturers. You get far greater efficiency having the application on one drive and the files on another. The CPU does not need to search the same drive the application is running from for its commands and files to edit.

the most efficient second drive is a second internal drive. the new WD drives with 8mb cache outspec even the fastest SCSI's now.

Hope this is helpful.

[jacko32]

yes that was helpful. I understand the benefits of a second drive, but how about this firewire?? I have a drive that cost me around $220. Its a 7200rpm 80gig firewire. As you can understand, i dont really want to buy another drive. How will this firewire work as the audio drive? (the firewire would be dedicated to just audio) Also, what about the processor speed issue? on digidesigns website it says a P4 2.0 ghz.....i have a P4 1.8ghz....what the hell.

[Mark_Knecht]

jacko,
Whether you use firewire or internal EIDE, you should use two drives as outlined above.

I like firewire because I can put the drive in a location that reduces noise, and it uses it's own power supply so I don't need such a large supply in the PC. (This applies to a second CDRW/DVD drive also.)

Using firewire is more expensive, but you can take it in steps if you want to. Personally I don't think you need such a good drive for your system drive. If you could find a more modest drive, make that your system drive and make the 80GB drive an internal EIDE drive.

Later, should you choose to want firewire, then you can take the internal drive out, still formatted, put it in a 1394 drive case, and all your files will be there, but will be on the 1394 bus. It's easy and it works.

Take care,
Mark