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]

Now, let's say you've got 10 Gb free on the internal drive. With that, you can go out without your external drive and record 7 hours of 2-track, or nearly 2 hours of 8-track. You can then come back and put it on your external and go out and start again.

Presto... i think you are missing the point here... the point is to avoid using the internal HD for recording purposes if at all possible because it's not really best suited for A/V work and its best not to use the same drive for recording that also is running your system and software. Yes it will work and you can do exactly what you described but for best results... an external drive (like the ones mentioned in the many numerous previous posts) will provide longer life and better quality overall.

My example... even though I have room on my Tibook HD to record... i avoid this and rely on using my Glyph Project X firewire drive for recording. If I must travel... its not big deal to bring it along since its not that big (bigger than the Mbox companion maybe) and its great being able to share it with my G3 desktop model at home. Before the Glyph, I relied on a SCSI card and a Lacie Tsunami 9gig drive for my recordings until it developed a bad sector and went to trash. I had tried recording on the internal 6gig drive that was in G3 when I first got the Digi001 and noticed that some recordings seemed to have minor skips or "hicups" in the some tracks especially if I tried to record 24bit.