Dual firewire drives

[Sessna]

I have a Mac powerbook G4 800 running Protoold LE and a Digi 002. I had read though the compatabiltiy info on the digidesign site, and it implied that for the maximum amount of tracks and speed...2 or more fireiwire drives should be used. Does this really make a big difference? I use an EZQuest Cobra 60GB drive now. I bought it on the advise of the guys at Magma. It really is a fast drive. Will my system improve with the addition of a second drive? How would I set the disc allocation in protools to utilize the two drives?

[DAS]

"Drive performance" will still improve with two drives. Most of video systems use RAID configured drives for this reason. The question is whether you even need improved drive performance. What are you hoping to gain?

There is a menu for disk allocation in Pro Tools, but alas, I can't remember which menu it is off the top of my head (someone here will). Most users who want projects to span multiple drives just divide up the tracks between them in some intelligent way. Be advised, however, that dividing projects among multiple drives can add a significant amount of "housekeeping" overhead to your workflow. Need to archive your session? Where is it all stored? That type of thing.

[Sessna]

I was hoping to decrease the error "Drive too slow or fragmented". I defrag my drive and still get that error. Sometimes I think it's because it puts file that come after each other on opposite sides of 'the block'. Would it work if I used two drives and selected "Round Robin" allocation? I just thought that if certain steps would allow for additional tracks...it would also let the computer have better all around performance whether it be 6 tracks, or 32. Also, I tried to record 32 tracks at once and it said that it couldn't due to the bandwith being taken up by the 002. I could record 30 tracks though.

[cmchamp]

I use Digital Performer, obviously different platform issues, but throughput issues are the same. I'm in the middle of a large project, recording a full sized Big Band, 28 tracks at 24/48. I'm 'round robin'ing to 6 drives. 4 internal on a Sonnet ATA card and 2 FireWire drives. I'm using the 2408MKII and 24i on the 324PCI card, so FW throughput isn't an issue. So, you would get better thoughput on two FW drives. I'm not really familiar with ProTools, but there should be a buffer size setting that may help.

[DAS]

Originally posted by Sessna
I was hoping to decrease the error "Drive too slow or fragmented

Yes, more drives will usually help with this problem quite a bit. It may come as a surprise that most users don't record (or play) very many tracks at once and often don't really need to add extra drives, but in your case it should really help.