Newbie - question about external Hard Drive for Macbook Pro

[j-mo]

Greetings,

I'm new to this forum and pretty new to computer based recording. Hoping to learn a thing or 2 and contribute once I've acquired some knowledge.

I bought a Presonus FireStudio Mobile a year and a half ago and never find the time to dig into it. Too much attention to guitar I guess. I also had an old computer.

Not long ago I picked up a new 15 inch Macbook pro. 2.3 quad, 8 GB, 256 GB SSD. It's great. It has 2 Thunderbolt ports and I recently bought an Apple Thunderbolt to FW adapter. My next move was to add external storage. I have a few external USB 2.0 HD's lying around but I planned to go FW. This Macbook only has 2 USB ports and I plan to use them for my mouse and midi keyboard.

My question is - should I just pick up an external FW drive or go external Thunderbolt (and use the 2nd Thunderbolt port)? Is there a benefit to either one? I believe Thunderbolt is faster than FW but if the Presonus interface is FW - does it matter?


Thanks!

 

[TimOBrien]

The speed of electricity does not change.
The bandwidth/capacity of Thunderbolt is 12x that of Firewire800.
Unless you are dealing with hundreds of simultaneous channels, it just doesn't matter.

I recently moved my projects drive to my iMac's tbolt port using the adapter. Works great; highly recommend it.

Remember that firewire devices daisy chain (up to 67 devices).
My firewire chain has been the same on my xp laptop and now my iMac for years with zero problems:

Computer --> Projects drive --> Samples drive --> Motu828mkII

The best thing is to get external drives with quad-interfaces.
I use Glyph drives with esata/firewire800/usb2 so I can use them on anything. They've been tanks.

 

[j-mo]

The speed of electricity does not change.
The bandwidth/capacity of Thunderbolt is 12x that of Firewire800.
Unless you are dealing with hundreds of simultaneous channels, it just doesn't matter.

I recently moved my projects drive to my iMac's tbolt port using the adapter. Works great; highly recommend it.

Remember that firewire devices daisy chain (up to 67 devices).
My firewire chain has been the same on my xp laptop and now my iMac for years with zero problems:

Computer --> Projects drive --> Samples drive --> Motu828mkII

The best thing is to get external drives with quad-interfaces.
I use Glyph drives with esata/firewire800/usb2 so I can use them on anything. They've been tanks.

Great info, thanks! I wasn't super concerned with bandwidth and I probably should have mentioned that. I just don't want to buy something and have compatibility headaches. Sounds like using the Thunderbolt adapter works great.

I'm def looking at Glyph but might pickup a LaCie 500GB Rugged Hard Disk Triple - USB3.0/FW800. $119 and it gets me in the game.

Thanks again!