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.

[Synthetic]

Stuartpa has a good point. Glyph "tunes" their drives so they work more effeciently for multimedia production. Also, Glyph has great support. If ANYTHING happens to your drive within the first year... just contact them or your retailer for a return and they ship you a new drive within 24 hours. That is part of the reason they cost more. I have a glyph drive (project x) 30gig that I use with my Digi001 and love it. Never had a bit of trouble with and fast tranfers.

Not all drives are built the same either. You should really seek the best performance when dealing with audio and that means looking at throughput rates and seek times. I do not recommend IDE simply for the way it handles incoming data (doesn't manage data effeciently enough for good performance especially with multitrack high bit rate use). It is possible to use just the standard ATA or IDE drives that come with laptops and desktops internally but you may experience some "hicups" in the recording when it gets too intense for it.

Audio drives should either be some form of SCSI or firewire for best performance and at least 7200 RPM with 10000 RPM being the ideal drive. Also, the bigger the drive... the more time it takes to read data and to find data so you want to get it as fast as possible.

So yes, any drive "will work" but, if you want reliability, performance and good support... you will most likely have to pay for it by spending more for your drive than just grabbing the most bytes for the buck.

I do know someone who created a 100gig wide SCSI raid system using cheaper drives that were bought seperately and then housed into a raid system for less than I paid for my Glyph 30Gig but I also know he was fuming mad when he lost a drive with important data on it too. So you never know.