External Hard Drives, Do I really need Glyph? Options

[Tim]

I'm getting a Powerbook and will be running ProTools LE and Absynth...at least for now. Some guys at a music store I am working with are making me think that I need a Glyph drive for my external hard drive. Now, I do know that i want an external drive, because i don't want to tax the Powerbook drive with the audio I record and playback. But, the Glyph drives are so expensive. I just looked at a Mac Warehouse Catelog and saw 7200 RPM, 80gig firewire drives for a little over $200. Won't this suffice. The 80gig Glyph Companion drive is $500.

Anybody using drives from LaCie, Que, etc? Any problems or rumored problems?

Thanks,
Tim.

[Stuartpa]

No doubt about it at all, you can put the exact same drive that Glyph uses in a box with a Power supply and get almost the same performace that you would get from a Glyph.

Glyph do tune their HDs so that they run at max performance for audio work but there are tons of drives out there that will do the job with no problem. Besides if you really want to get into it there are some utilities Like Hard Disk toolkit and others that will also let you tune your drives up this is mostly for SCSI drives (Be careful here as you can also detune a drive real fast)

Having said that use Glyphs ( I am getting old and lazy) but right next to them on the same SCSI bus I also have a couple of Older Drive Kits that I have dragged along with me through several system upgrades and they still work just fine.

You are going to make your CPU work pretty hard no matter what drives you use and getting something because Digi says is ususally just a real good way to spend money you could other wise save.

La Cie make really good drive systems and have been around for years so you might want to give them a call and see what they recommend.

You can also make up a drive yourself if you have the time it is not at all a difficult proposition and you will save some money, but at least a drive from La Cie will be warrantied and you will get support for what you bought.

The 80 G Firewire drive you are looking at will probably work fine as long as you do not try to start laying down 32 tracks all at the same time.