Here's the "man of a thousand questions" again....

I plan to use an external hard drive to store the actual recordings that I will
be doing with Digital Performer on my Power Mac, leaving the internal hard
drive for only system software and the Digital Performer software itself.

What is the best brand and type of external hard drive for this? Should I pay
attention to speed statistics (or any other statistics, for that matter)?

Any help will be MUCH appreciated...as always....

HWBossHoss wrote:
I plan to use an external hard drive to store the actual recordings that I will
be doing with Digital Performer on my Power Mac, leaving the internal hard
drive for only system software and the Digital Performer software itself.

What is the best brand and type of external hard drive for this? Should I pay
attention to speed statistics (or any other statistics, for that matter)?

Your three choices on types of connection (beside traditional SCSI) a

(1) USB 1.1
(2) USB 2.0
(3) Firewire

The most important thing is to avoid USB 1.1. USB 2.0 and Firewire
are about the same speed, but USB 1.1 is about 40 times slower
than either.

Confusingly, they have started referring to USB 1.1 (slow) as
"full-speed USB" and USB 2.0 (fast) as "hi-speed USB", so that's
something to watch out for.

You also need to watch out, if you get a USB-only drive, that
your computer can handle USB 2.0. Plenty of older computers can
only do USB 1.1; it'll depend on your Mac what it can do. This
is not a problem with Firewire, and anyway the norm these days
with external drives is that they support both USB 2.0 and Firewire.

Beyond that, the three most important specs (in order by importance)
for a hard drive a

(1) RPM -- 7200 RPM is good; higher is better.
(2) Buffer size. 2 MB is standard; 8 MB is better.
(3) Warranty length. Some are as little as one year now, which is
not a good sign that it's a quality drive.

There is one other thing that can matter: what type of interface
the drive uses internally. Most (if not all) external USB or
Firewire drives these days have a regular ATA hard drive inside
and a convertor that allows it to work with USB and/or Firewire.
They could be ATA100 or ATA133 drives, and it would probably make
a small difference. But I'm not sure if it's easy to find out
which one they are without taking the thing apart and looking
up the model number of the drive inside, so I wouldn't worry about
it. :-)

- Logan

Your three choices on types of connection (beside traditional SCSI) a

(1) USB 1.1
(2) USB 2.0
(3) Firewire


Actually it needs to break down further to differentiate FireWire 400 from
FireWire 800. FW 800 moves data twice as fast as FW 400, & is implemented on
most of the new Apple computers.



Scott Fraser