External Hard drives

[agitatedbells]

Apologies if this has been asked before, I did a search and couldnt find it

I have an Imac that i am running Pro Tools 9 on however im having a couple "cpu error" messages and found out that its best to run pro tools on an external hard drive? The fastest ones seem to be firewire however im using a Presonus Firestudio which is firewire, and my imac only has the 1 firewire port.

I have an external hard drive but i dont think its fast enough, are there any decent Usb externals that would do the job for Pro Tools? mid price range would prefferable

Thanks guys

Stu

 

[jipchen]

You can also try to run a Firewire harddisk plugged into the second FW port on the Firestudio.. it's called daisy-chaining and it's basically what Firewire is all about.
I know a lot of people do it (not with this exact interface but in general) and it worked for me, too with a Presonus FP10. Just pay attention to get the right cable because the Firewire ports on the Firestudio are FW400 and not the newer rectangular FW800 ports.. so depending on the harddrive you get you need a 400->800 cable or 400->400. In this picture, 800 is on the left and 400 on the right

If you want to go the USB route, pretty much any normal external harddisk should work if you use USB 2.0 or 3.0. 7200rpm would probably be better but also louder.

Also: You are not supposed to run ProTools from the external disk, just the sessions! So you use the external HDD for the project sessions and audio files, not the PT installation.

 

[agitatedbells]

Thanks for the quick reply. I was aware that there was a second firewire port on the presonus however i thought i would only be able to daisychain another firestudio but that definately helps thanks. And yeah i knew that the pro tools would run off the system and the audio on the harddrive.

wouldnt be an issue if i could afford a mac pro however thats not the case!