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]

sometimes its hard to just look at some stats to determine performance of a system because often there are many variables that are not accounted for and hard to forsee unless you are an electronic engineer... so sometimes you just have to rely on the old trial-and-error method.

a good example is the use of USB for audio recording which many claimed was worthless for multitrack recording especially at high bit rates but most of the tests I have read about the new USB audio interfaces like the emagic models and tascam claim good recording quality even on internal drives so you never know. When it comes down to it... it just depends on how important quality is and what price you are willing to pay for it. Heck, I remember reading article about an older Eurythmics album that was a big hit and it was recorded on 8 track analog without big studio. Maybe sometimes the material itself is more important than how it was recorded