In article ,
"Ray Thomas" wrote:

Can anyone recommend a reliable, quiet external hard drive for use with
location laptop recording. Mostly live to 2 track using Wavelab. Is USB 1.1
ok or should I go for Firewire 400 ? Or perhaps even further to FW 800 and
USB 2.0 (have no ports for these latter two on current laptop however).

The IDE drive in your laptop might be faster than any of these, and
should give you less CPU overhead than any sort of FW or USB drive. USB
1.1 is really really slow and might cause dropouts or other transient
problems. Further, if your audio interface also uses the same bus,
there won't be enough bandwidth to do both.

If I were you, I'd upgrade the internal drive to a large, modern 5400 or
7200 RPM IDE and record straight to that. Back at the ranch, you could
transfer that audio out to an external drive and not worry about how
fast the transfer goes since the performance has already been captured.


Best of luck,

Monte McGuire