Running Protools on a 2 HD machine?

[crowbar0]

Hi, I am planning on installing and running a Digi 001 on my pc, and adding a second hard drive (200gb) on which Protools (and nothing else!) will be installed, and bringing my ram up to 1Gb.

The PC will still have the original hard drive operating as well, with internet, games etc on it, so will this affect Protools running?

I will obviously just be booting off of one hard drive or the other depending on what I want to use, and I dont think it should cause any problems, but I just wanted to check beforehand!

Any thoughts appreciated, thanks, Barry.

 

[manning1]

i dont know your system in detail. i'm not there loooking at it.
all i would caution is to be carefull what other cards you have in your
pci slots. some can cause interruptions like tv tuner cards, certain
high power gaming cards, and network cards sometimes.
i also dont like big 200 gb hard drives for reasons ive mentioned before on this bbs as i'm a computer engineer. i would recommend no larger than 120 gb drives. and preferably 8mb cache. a full detail of your pc confign will produce further comments if you wish.
by the way...my recording daw never sees the internet. i use a seperate pc for internetting, games etc.

 

[crankz1]

The main purpose of having a second hard drive is to use it as the working directory for the audio data stream only (and maybe some archival purposes). The first hard drive would contain the OS and all of the programs (including Pro Tools).
If you want your Pro Tools setup to be totally separate from your normal computing setup, you should consider running a dual boot configuration on the primary drive.

 

[bennychico11]

i second what crankz and manning said...and if you're you're running pro tools, then just disable anything you don't need. Any PCI cards, network cards, etc. This might help reduce problems and it's an easy couple clicks to do.

 

[crowbar0]

Thanks for the replies, yeah I'm gonna run it as a dual boot, so that nothing on the primary drive (like internet shit) could get across!

As for other PCI cards, all I have is a Radeon Sapphire 128mb graphics card, so hopefully that shouldn't cause many problems.

I know that a seperate PC would be the best way to go but I just can't afford it at the moment, and the upgrade will only be €200-300.

So, Manning1, you'd recommend not going above 120gb hard drive size?

I thought it was the bigger the better when it came to Protools?!

Full spec of PC currently;
Intel PIII 1.7g
256mb Ram
40g hard disk
Radeon Sapphire 128mb
Dont know the motherboard,
Seperate USB broadband modem.

 

[manning1]

yep - thats my recommendation crowbar.
no bigger than 120 gb.
btw - matrox video cards are the most well behaved ive come across.
you MUST also get 512 ram. 256 is too low for digital audio imho and has given loads of people problems.

 

[crowbar0]

yeah, I'm getting 1Gb of ram so I shouldn't have any problems with that!