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.

[rickenbacker]

Synthetic has got it exactly right - home recordists can produce some excellent work. It's probably not going to compete with a Shania Twain or Jamiroquai album, even if they are using the same software (I know Jay Kay used Logic Platinum to record his last album), but it's still going to sound pretty good. A lot of the early house records - and I'm talking massive global hits, here - were recorded on 4-track machines and mastered from cassette. This was the early '90s, too - not the '70s! So anything you can do on a modern Mac has the potential to sound fantastic.

I've tried quite a few of the new USB interfaces (Mbox, both Tascam 428 and 224, Edirol UA-5 and UA-700, Swissonic Studio-D) and - in my opinion, for what it's worth - they're all fine for audio work. As Joe Meek said, if it sounds right, it IS right. And he was recording vocals on the staircase of his flat on the Holloway Road in London.

As for the new high-speed FireWire, talking to a friend who works on a Mac magazine here in the UK, he's not heard about any new products featuring 1394b due for release in the next few months. So if you need a FireWire drive now, you might as well get one rather than hang about waiting. Current FireWire speeds are still pretty nippy.