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.

[Presto]

"...noticed that some recordings seemed to have minor skips or "hicups" in some tracks"

Thanks Synthetic. I've often heard not to use the internal drive for audio, but never been told why. I haven't therefore taken the warnings seriously. Haven't noticed the hiccup/skip problem yet, but then I've not much experience either. For the moment I just trash what I don't like.

"don't use your internal hd for audio recording/playback if it is the drive you boot your daw from! try to keep one third of the available space on your boot drive available.
regularly optimize a regularly USED audio drive
backup regularly... 8-)"

Thanks for advice Damann too. I may follow it ;-) Any more info on why? Perhaps 1 or 2 track recording doesn't lead to the problems encountered with 8-tracks.

Concerning 800Mb/sec FW, I wonder how many Mb/sec small projects really need.