What size FW HD for a Laptop??

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unobus20

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I'm looking to purchase a Firewire Hard drive to go with my Laptop and MBox. I'm wondering what size would be good for a newbie like me? I don't plan on doing anything fancy, just recording guitars, bass, vocals and keys via the Mbox. Would you recommend 60, 80 or 120Gigs?? Also, my laptop has USB 2.0 and I've heard that's actually faster than Firewire (480 mbps vs. 400 mbps). Could I just connect it to the USB 2.0 port or does it really need to be connected to the firewire port? Thanks for all your help.
 
Get as big as you can afford. If its only going to be for music recording than 60 should do the trick. If a drive is made for FW - then you use FW. If its made for USB2 - then use your USB ports. If you have a Ford and a Honda, and the Honda goes quicker - can you use your Ford key to start the Honda?
 
Good point! Thanks for the info. The reason I was asking about FW vs. USB2 is because a lot of the drives today are both FW and USB2. So that would mean I could plug them into either port and I was thinking since USB2 is supposed to be slightly faster than FW, maybe I could plug the drive into the USB2 port and leave the Firewire port open for a FW interface or something. Thanks again for your help.
 
Uno, you're right. There are external drives by most manufacurers now, some of which are forward thinking enough to provide both interfaces. And USB 2.0 is a little faster than firewire, at least until the newer firewire stuff hits the streets probably early next year, at which time you'll need either a new firewire card or a new laptop to take advantage of its speed.

I've not tried an external drive for recording with my laptop yet, just bought a 120 gig Maxtor that's both firewire and USB2 - I'm thinking it should be faster if you want to record multiple tracks, since the internal drives for laptops are mostly 4500 rpm vs 7200.

USB has kind of a bad rep for audio, RME put out a negative blurb on it a while back - not sure if that's improved since, their main gripe was hogging the buss and causing glitches.

Haven't had time to learn more on this, due to moderating the Construction area of John's new site. Hope that helped some... Steve
 
I guess I wasnt too clear in my statement. I was only saying you cant switch them at will. If the thing is made for both - you choose.
 
If you use any other USB devices, I'd put it in the FW port just to have dedicated bandwidth. Other than that, you probably won't run into any problems either way until your track count starts getting high.

Take care,
Chris
 
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