External Drive Vs Firewire Drive, Options

[Philosorhymes]

Hi all, I would like to purchase one of the new macs (I am not yet sure if it will be a pro or normal macbook) but I would eventually be putting some big sample libraries from Native Instrument on the drives.

I have a question though, Which would be faster, between these two configurations below


1) Upgrading my macbook or (macbook pro), to a 7200rpm drive and installing my libraries on this OR

2) Leaving the standard drive in my macbook (or macbook pro) and getting an external Bus powered Firewire Drive and installing my libraries on this. (The external will be 5400rpm).


The idea is that I carry minimal bulk so I do not really want to get an external 7200rpm drive as all these require power supplies which are normally fairly bulky.


Many Thanks in advance.

[charlzz]

5400 is fine if you're only recording up to 8 tracks at a time to an internal or external drive. If you record to the internal drive, you need to partition it with a seperate partition for the audio tracks. And, you should defragment that partition before you start recording.

But, the standard proceedure is to record audio tracks to an external FW400 drive 7200rpm. If you have a huge sample library, it should go on a third external 7200.

If you check out Digidesign requirements, for example. They won't even talk to you in tech support if you're not using this configuration. If you're not using an external FireWire 400, 7200rpm, 8MB cache drive, then you're just asking for an inconsistent recording experience. If you're recording something important, do you really want to risk audio dropout? And if you're using a FireWire interface, you must get a FireWire 400 drive that has two FW400 jacks on it and plug the drive into the computer first and the interface into the drive. The FireWire400 drive should also use the Oxford911 bridge chip. (The new triple or quadruple interface drives only have one FW400 jack)

Here is the info straight from Digidesign:

To date only FireWire drives with the following specifications have performed well with Pro Tools systems:
7200 RPM drive
FireWire 400 drives with the Oxford 911 FireWire chipset interface
FireWire 400 drives with the Oxford 912 or 924 FireWire chipset interface
FireWire 800 drives with the Oxford 912 or 924 FireWire chipset interface
FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 drives should not be combined
Check with the drive manufacturer to verify that their drive has the "Oxford 911", "Oxford 912", "Oxford 924" or comparable chipset & drive speed of 7200 rpm