Macintosh Dual SCSI Busses – Which One To Use?

For hard disk recording on the Mac, the rule of thumb has always been to use a dedicated external hard drive for audio data. Based on some of the Macs and Mac-compatibles manufacturers are coming out with currently, we’re having to re-think this a bit. Many of the new Macs feature dual SCSI busses; an internal and an external. In some cases the internal bus is actually Fast SCSI (10 Mb/sec) while the external bus is regular SCSI (5 Mb/sec). If this is the case with your computer, for maximum performance the best approach would be to install a second Fast SCSI drive on the internal bus for audio data, and use the slower external bus for other non-Fast SCSI devices and applications.