Quick Tip: Go for the fastest and largest capacity drive you can afford. If you’re feeling frivolous you may even consider a Glyph rack mounted drive.
I personally use a G-tech G-Drive which has great connectivity – two firewire 800 (or 400 with an 800-400 cable) ports, one USB 2.0 port and an eSATA port. Avid have qualified a set of firewire drive chipsets:Īvid also recommend two manufacturers in particular Avastor HDX/SDX or OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro.
Your hard drive will have a chipset this will be listed in the manual or on the manufacturers website. Firewire drives should not be used on Windows 7 machines.don’t try to record to a firewire and a SATA drive at the same time Don’t mix record/playback drive types i.e.Solid-state drives aren’t officially ‘qualified’ by Avid, but from experience they do make excellent system drives.External drives can be eSATA, USB 2.0 or Firewire (Mac only).
By utilizing a separate drive for audio recording and playback, you are essentially spreading the load so you should experience fewer error messages and fewer issues with speed.Ĭheck out the 3 best hard drives for Pro Tools below:ĪVID recommends this harddrive because of its excellent features, portability, and durability. If you then burden it to also stream twenty audio tracks in real time, maybe with effects and probably with fades, the drive has to work extremely hard. Why? Your system drive has to run the operating system and any programs – in our case Pro Tools. It is recommended that you have a separate dedicated drive(s) for audio record/playback – it may seem unimportant at first, but believe me it has dramatic effects on the way Pro Tools, or any DAW for that matter performs.