Hello, I just spoke with a digidesign tech this afternoon and was told that when using an external firewire HD enclosure the largest recommended drive is 160GB. What I was curious to know is if anyone is using an HD larger than 160GB and at what cost? Do you experience any performance issues or -errors??? I have just bought a brand new 250GTB/7200RPM drive and can return it if I need to! Thanks in advance!

I would not use a firewire drive that large for recording/playback of active sessions. That is mainly a archiving, importing, & exporting drive that you keep on your shelf... I think the issue is due to it being so large that seek times would hender preformace. Of coarse partitioning it in a bunch of partitions is possible. But that would mainly be good, and work for a real drive (ATA, SATA, SCSI) as far as a recording volume. Firewire drives of that size just can not be recommended for stablaly and efficiently being a "online" active recording/playback volume. But they are really great for back ups, archiving, importing, and exporting all your files... I would keep it for that, and go and get another one or two small ones for your active recording, and playback volumes--

Firewire drive size has no effect on stability, and no direct effect on seek times.

Why is it then do you think that Digi don't recommend going past their certain recommended drive size then ?? One could only believe it is due to what I said. But I very well could be wrong sense I am just taking an educated guess... What do you think ??

okay, for exmple lets' say I go out and get a 160GB, what would be the best way to "partition it wisely"??? Also what is the favored partition utility these days for the mac? I think I read somewhere to use Apple's.... thanks guys for all of your info so far...............

Yes, Apple Disk Utility in Jaguar or Panther. HFS Extended. No journaling. Keep in mind that the first partition on a disk will be the fastest, so don't split a disk up into a bunch of partitions and then use the last one for rec/playback.

Thanks auxsend1, What is the average partition size for a 160GB? 2 partitions of 80GB's ...4 partitions of 40GB's each? What are most of the guys doing out there? thanks again.

That's a tough one. Depends on the size of the sessions you'll be working on, and how many at the same time. Personally, I wouldn't split up a 160 into more than 3 or 4 partitions. And use that last one for storage only (or smaller sessions). What you want to avoid is having your sessions get too big for the partition they're in. Because even though the other partitions may be empty, I don't think it's good to have a single partition get full or nearly full. May cause a crash. I think there could be a book (or at the very least an article) written about hard drive partitioning theory LOL....

I have mine partitioned into a 30GB drive which I do my actual work on, and and a 130GB drive which I store sessions on at the end of the day. Then, once I have successfully copied the entire session and all the audio files on to the 130GB partition, I format the 30GB partition. The next morning when I go back to work I will copy the session back onto the 30GB partition. This completely eliminates hard drive fragmentation problems. Dangerous though. Make sure you have a backup, because once I formatted the wrong disc.