External Hard Drive recomendation

D

dean1964

New member
I was wondering if anyone here could recommend an external hard drive for use with cross platform pro tools systems. I mean, I will be going back and forth between Mac based HD and LE systems (the office) and windows M-powered systems (home). I'm sure ill have to use MAC DRIVE and format HSF, I just need help picking out the hardware and I just can't bring myself to spending $400 on a drive "specially designed" for audio, when they don't really seem all that special.

Thanks for any help.
 
Not a recommendation, just a refferal for a possible resource: Jahret Sylvester, with S&A INTERNATIONAL ENTERPRISES LLC, Jahret@comcast.net sells harddrives that may be what you need.

But do tell him I reffered you (Steve Boudreaux)
 
Honestly, I cant say for certain. However, the LE and HD versions are on MAC hosts, and I am running M-powered on a windows host at home. By all indications it should work. Anybody have experience with this?
 
I use a Glyph drive on my system at home. It is an LE system, but I often bring projects home from work done in HD and work on them. I only had one problem where my drive crashed, and I lost everything, but since their warranty and support kicks ass they did data recovery for FREE!
 
I wish I had a Mac pro at home. One day...maybe.

The Glyph drives, although I am sure they perform very well, seem very over priced. I don't know anything about the LaCie drives.

I once recorded a show with 32 tracks (16 / 44.1) for 2.5hrs continuously each night for two weeks. I use my WD myBook external over USB2.0 that I paid $100 for and had not one drive issue. So I turned around and recorded other shows with it. Now, the drive is about as full as I can allow it to be.

I'm leaning toward the OWC. If anyone could think of a reason why I should'ent be, please, speak up, I can only afford to do this once! =)
 
Might help, probably not:

I didn't want to drop 300-400 on a new external so I used my old imac, with a broke screen, as a make shift external hard drive. You have to put the old mac into target disk mode and it will act just like an external HD.
 
Your right. That doesn't help - but its a very cool trick and I'm going to save it for later. Thanks for sharing.
 
Digidesign will only support firewire external drives with a spindle speed of at least 7200 RPM.

There are specific recommendations at the Digidesign website here: http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?langid=51&navid=54&itemid=23142 though that's not to say you can't use similarly spec'd drives.

Be sure to read the sections on Firewire Drives and the section entitled "Mac HFS+ Disk Support Option" - provided you have Pro Tools 7.3 or higher...

Digidesign said:
"With the Mac HFS+ Disk Support option installed on a Windows computer, you can mount an HFS+ drive on a Windows-based Pro Tools system, and record and play back Pro Tools sessions directly on that drive as if it were natively formatted (for example, NTFS or FAT32) for Windows.
Click to expand...

Be sure to format HFS+ and you should be set.

Hope that helps!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top