I've always heard that Glyph was the best. I have a LaCie drive, which works with both Macs and PCs. The LaCie works quite well, even though my model is discontinued. Good prices too. Maybe a more knowledgable person can chime in :D . God bless.

Macintosh & PC compatible generally means a FAT 32 format. That's not necessarily the best format for PC. NTFS is! So I think your request is a bit on the uninformed side of things? After all, we all drive vehicles with 4 tires on them. This means however, a Chevy engine doesn't fit into a Ford. And a Ford engine doesn't fit into a Chevy. Make a selection! You can't be both a girl & boy unless you are born with a birth defect. So both, isn't necessarily desirable nor necessary. You can always dump from an NTFS formatted hard drive to a FAT 32 Hard Drive if necessary. Or, vice versa. Just like it doesn't make any sense to mix marriage with infidelity when you're marriage really needs high fidelity.

Divorced in stereo
Ms. Remy Ann David

Well I see where youre coming from there. I may just go with a seagate or western digital drive possibly. Dont wanna spend too much on a hard drive...I have been wondering though should I connect via esata or would firewire 800 be sufficient? I dont record more than 2 tracks at once, or more than 40 total...

I really, really recommend spending the money for a good quality hard drive. The last thing you want is a malfunctioning or broken hard drive. The cheaper drives do tend to have issues over time.

Is Lacie in the quality hard drive business? I had a bad experience with one of their drives and one of their scsi cd burners.

It is still difficult to talk about.

I'd say LaCie drives are good quality. I've always been told by those in the recording business to buy a Glyph if you can, but a LaCie will get the job done. I've had my LaCie for over a year, and it gets used fairly often, and I haven't had any issues with it.

I've had very little trouble with Western Digital overall. (Aside from their 250 gig abomination EIDE drives, which everyone seemed to have the same problem with, about a year ago...they ALL seemed to die, the same way, around the same time...very strange.)

There are very few HD manufacturers out there now anyway; most are putting different names on the same core group of drive makers. (Quantum got out of the HD business a while ago, for example....)

SATA and ESATA seem to be the standard nowadays as well. Find a good reliable drive speed and size, and off you go. (72000 RPM has become almost universal for most drives now, except for the smaller pocket drives that are only running at 54000 RPM).

Aside from that, you can build your own remote & removable caddy from most off the shelf brands and stuff it with whatever you want; Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, etc. FW400 & USB 2 are just about the same, data-rate. FW800 is out there, but I don't know if you need that much throughput for what you're describing.

It's usually cheaper to just buy a few caddy's and remove the drives as they fill up. How may caddies, cables & power supplies does one really need anyway? I have a shelf FULL of big HDs; almost one per client, but only a handful of caddies. I'd never be able to afford it otherwise.

And of course, make sure you keep TWO copies going, on separate drives, at least while the project is underway. Once it's completed and mastered, you can exhale and perhaps just keep one copy on file on a HD. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble with no backups.

Learned the hard way. :wink:

I just got shipped 3 bad (out of the box) Western Digital Sata Drives about a month ago. 24 hours of troubleshooting later I returned them and bought Seagate. They work flawlessly as usual. I dont think I will buy Western D again....

Just my 2 cents.

Well i've gotten a lot of recomendation to get seagate..that is if I were to get an external enclosure only like mentioned above..I think i'm gonna get a hard drive enclosure..with firewire800 and esata connections to my computer, and just go with a seagate 500gb internal drive to stick in it or something. thanks for all the help you all will come back if i have more questions

I'm sure you mean 7200 and 5400.

I wouldn't mind a 72000rpm model. :)

The 72Kspin-em-and-win-em models are noisy as NasCar and you can cook burgers on it.

When they say this hard drive is HOT they mean this hard drive is HOT!!!!

I have a techincal question for someone to answer...

My ASUS motherboard has PCI slots (32-bit), not the newer 64-bit PCI-X slots....The PCI has a transfer rate of 133 MB/sec and the PCI-X has 266MB/sec

my question is: If I am running esata in my PCI slot..which esata has a transfer rate of 3gb/sec, am I wasting my money on esata when the PCI card i'd have could only transfer 133 mb/sec? What if I were to use firewire 400, or firewire 800??? Would esata be any faster with a normal PCI?

Conventional PCI bus specifications
32-bit PCI Golfinger Voltage Visual Comparison
32-bit PCI Golfinger Voltage Visual Comparison

* 33.33 MHz clock with synchronous transfers
* Peak transfer rate of 133 MB per second for 32-bit bus width (33.33 MHz × 32 bits ÷ 8 bits/byte = 133 MB/s)
* 32-bit bus width
* 32-bit address space (4 gigabytes)
* 32-bit port space (now deprecated)
* 256-byte configuration space
* 3.3- or 5-volt signaling
* Reflected-wave switching

I am fairly certain that your firewire has to use the same bus as well.

But, If your getting 133MB/sec thats not a bad transfer rate. Look up some bench marks for some HDD's and then do a benchmark with your existing set up. I'm sure if you don't have any "other" problems they won't be that far off.

Just because the spec for sata is either 1GB/sec or 3GB/sec doesn't mean that you will get that.

pfactionbrett wrote: I have a techincal question for someone to answer...

My ASUS motherboard has PCI slots (32-bit), not the newer 64-bit PCI-X slots....The PCI has a transfer rate of 133 MB/sec and the PCI-X has 266MB/sec

my question is: If I am running esata in my PCI slot..which esata has a transfer rate of 3gb/sec, am I wasting my money on esata when the PCI card i'd have could only transfer 133 mb/sec? What if I were to use firewire 400, or firewire 800??? Would esata be any faster with a normal PCI?

Most eSATA PCI expansion cards will adapt to the bus they plug into (32bit/33MHz, 64/33, 64/66 and 64/133), but some will not work well at 32/33.

If your eSATA adaptor will run at extended rates, check that you do not have any conventional PCI cards on the same PCI bus segment, as the segment will run at the rate of the slowest card.

You would get better performance from a native FireWire interface, but not from a FireWire interface on a PCI card.

I would use the eSATA adaptor for now until you get a new computer that has native eSATA connectors.

By native do you mean actually permanently built into the computer? From what i've been told the PCI firewire would not be any different from the computer's firewire of a permanently installed one. Is this incorrect?

"Native" in this context usually means connected directly to the motherboard's bridge chips via a high-speed connection and not going via another level of interface such as parallel PCI.

So a properly-implemented FireWire interface on the motherboard should give you better throughput than a plug-in PCI FireWire adaptor. However, some motherboards use a cheapskate approach and connect their FireWire controller to the PCI bus. In this case, you would see little difference between the built-in FireWire and a plug-in PCI FireWire card. Caveat emptor.

So as my final question just to be sure about this.... Am I going to want to get esata as my connection or firewire? Am I going to notice a faster transfer even though 32-bit PCI is limited to below the 3gb transfer rate of the esata connection?

I wont be recording more than two tracks at once..or more than 40 altogether.

Thanks for all the help so far, let me know what you think.

If you are stuck with a motherboard that has no on-board FireWire or eSATA, then separate FireWire and eSATA PCI plug-in cards are going to be as good as you can get. The external drives and audio interface would be usable with a carefully-chosen new motherboard in the future.

pfactionbrett wrote: So as my final question just to be sure about this.... Am I going to want to get esata as my connection or firewire? Am I going to notice a faster transfer even though 32-bit PCI is limited to below the 3gb transfer rate of the esata connection?

I wont be recording more than two tracks at once..or more than 40 altogether.

Thanks for all the help so far, let me know what you think.

Compare some independent benchmarks on both kinds of drives you are looking at. Then compare prices.

I just got 2 new sata drives using on board sata and they are all in the low 100MB/s+ range (I can't remember the exact #) for sustained transfers. I checked and this is pretty average for the drives I bought. I have easily recorded 8 tracks at once. and have had around 25 tracks with no problems.

My point being the the 133MB/s bottle neck will more then likly not be the weakest link.

Rocstor is another brand to consider. They don't get much buzz...not like the others previously mentioned here.
I've had one for about a year, no problems, little noise/heat.

I ended up buying a 500gb external fantom drive because it was on sale for cheaper than it would have cost me to build an internal seagate with a enclosure. I bought it for $95.00 new at compusa, has esata connection. It is however a FAT32 format which remy said to stay away from.....

I am getting a message when I start protools saying that my protools audio files or something having to do with NTFS drives are over 11 characters long and protools needs them under 11 characters long so rename and restart protools...

What does this mean exactly? If you need an exact message ill post it up here next time I boot up protools, but it would help if someone has gotten this before and knows what im talking about.

It means you should convert the new drive to NTFS:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456984.aspx

I believe it already is....

Here's the error when I open Protools:

WARNING
Loss of Plug-In authorization keys may occur.

This system contains one or more drive(s) formatted with NTFS, which have volume names longer than 11 characters. This combination is known to corrupt some InterLok Plug-In authorizations. If you know which drives are authorized and they are not configured this way, or if you have no InterLok protected plug-ins, then you may continue. In order to remedy this issue before corruption can occur click "Yes" to quit Pro Tools and rename NTFS volumes to names that are 11 characters or less. Next, re-launch Pro Tools and this dialog should not appear.

Quit Pro Tools?

What did you name the drive, supercalifragilisticexpealidouse? Maybe try something like "E" or "F"? Check the drive properties and ensure its NTFS as well. Just reformat if its wrong. You'll only loose an hour or so of time.

I believe I named it F...Well, theres a small chance I named it Fantom Drive...I guess i'll wait and check when I go back to my studio Monday night.

"Fantom Drive" would be 12. That could be your problem.