Looking to get the most out of your Pro Tools system? Do your sessions tend to slow down when you get a few tracks in there? Do you get error messages a lot? Here’s a simple tip for you that will help. Buy and use an external hard drive alongside your internal system drive. This can be either firewire or USB 2.0 (depending on what ports your computer has) and can come in any size of course.
How will an external drive help?
Here’s the idea: your main system drive is where your operating system, programs/applications, and plugins are installed. When you record in a Pro Tools session, you are saving the audio onto your hard drive. As you begin laying down more tracks, Pro Tools is trying to not only 
operate the software and plugins off of your system drive, but it’s trying to read from and write audio to the same drive. This tends to bog the drive down causing errors or slow system performance.
The solution is to use a separate hard drive designated as your Audio drive. You install Pro Tools and all your software on your main system drive like normal, but when you create a new session you save it to your external drive. Now when you record audio it will be writing to one drive while your system drive is free to run Pro Tools. It’s a beautiful thing.
Other perks
Not only will having an external drive help system performance, it helps your mobility. If you record on a friend’s system or in another studio you can bring your drive and record the session there while leaving your main computer at home. Then just bring the hard drive back home, hook it up, and Pro Tools will read the session perfectly.
Some Options
Here just a few options for good external drives to look into. At the end of the day all that matters is that it works with your computer and is quiet!
Western Digital 500GB – $89
Lacie 1TB (i.e. 1000GB) – $109
Super portable Western Digital 320GB – $89
Comments
Great article, but you left out one crucial part. Pro Tools functions best with external firewire harddrives. Pref. fw400. None of the hard drives you showed have firewire ports. Firewire is alot better for recording streaming audio since it does not use the system bus. The latter can not be said for usb2. So go Firewire. Digidesign even recommends a firewire over an internal pci drive.
Hi Fridrikur! Great point about Firewire drives. I have used many with great success in my Pro Tools rig. The only reason I didn’t recommend them is because for all intents and purposes USB 2.0 is becoming the future in computer audio for plug and play devices.
Most PCs don’t have firewire ports and just look at Apple’s latest line of Macbooks, dropping the firewire port. Plus you see so many new audio interfaces going the route of USB 2.0, including Digidesign’s newest interface, the Eleven Rack.
So yes, Firewire 400 is a fantastic option if you have it, but USB 2.0 will be just fine. Cheers!
I was thinking the same thing about Digidesign recommending the use of firewire and Not usb 2.0 because they say it isn’t compatible. Can anyone clear this up? I am getting error messages and my new computer does not have a firewire port.
When in doubt, try to use what Avid recommends. People however still run into issues with different drives and different ports. Try getting on the duc.avid.com support forum and see what people say.
If you’re on W7 and PT9, DO NOT use a firewire drive…it must be usb2.0
Firewire is still okay for mac…..400 or 800
Hey there,
I’ve been using an external hard drive for Pro Tools editing. However I’ve only just realized that when I process a sound in Audiosuite (I’m a sound fx editor so I use audiosuite rather than RTAS) the new sound gets copied onto the HD of my computer.
As you can imagine this gets messy as my main session is on my external and my rendered files are on my local HD
Does anyone know how to change the location settings for rendered Audiosuite sounds?
Thanks
You’ll want to tweak your Disk Allocation setting in the SETUP menu. Make sure it’s all set to the right hard drive.
This is a sort of related question about how when I am using a VST like Structure to, say, import a Sibelius score and use Structure’s orchestration samples. The more banks I use and the more complex the score, the more chance of having buffer overflow issues. Would it be preferable (or even possible) to have the samples Structure uses located on the external drive? Or does it just load the samples as soon as you create each patch, so it’s a non issue? Anyhow, I am experiencing the buffer overflow issue a lot in this type of instance. Maybe I just need to go higher than the 8 GB RAM I have running on my Windows 7 64-bit.
It definitely helps to keep samples on an external drive!
what is wrong with windows 7 and pt9 firewire?
I have pt9 and the mbox 3 pro (requires firewire)
I am investing in a computer to work it all, but I cant afford a mac, and everyone says not to mix W7, PT9 and firewire, but nobody says why.
What happens?
What is so wrong with the combination?
Dakota, I don’t use Windows so I couldn’t tell you. Head over to duc.avid.com for support. Those guys are great!
As you mentioned here most PC’s and Macs don’t have fire wire ports. Next step would be USB. Ive looked at Glyph Externals but they are very pricey. And Ive also heard that they’re made with Seagate drives. Now, that being said. I know RPM Speed has to be 7200. Im fairly new to the world of recording and everything Ive learned so far is from your site and youtube vids. (Thank you btw) So, when looking for External Hard drives for recording is Average Seek Time,Cache Size, and Transfer Rate important to look at?? If so, what is the best specifications to look for??
Thanks in advance. God Bless..
Angel – I try to see what drives Avid recommends for Pro Tools and take it from there. Have had great success with Lacie drives and OWC (www.macsales.com).
If you dont mind me asking, what external drives are you currently using??
I currently use w7 64-bit, PT9, and the profire 2626 which connects via firewire. I started with plenty issues but discovered workarounds that fixed the problems I’d encountered. These fixes included disabling a internal usb root hub that shared the same irq as my firewire audio device and using a standard VGA driver because the newest driver available for my Radeon x1600 will work fine with w7 but isn’t supported which equals less efficiency and compatibility and caused some performance hogging while tracking….but no more firewire issues. A Texas Instruments chipset is also the key. Luckily my motherboard (Intel975xbx2 w/Dual-core 3.2) includes this chipset. Updated hardware drivers are essential, except for the firewire which has to use legacy drivers to work best. If you don’t have on-board firewire then there are PCI firewire cards available with this chipset. I do notice issues with video at times when plug-in drawing is required. Clicking on the plugin again cures and so will a new video card, but I’m cool. Not a huge price to pay to use W7 64-bit and PT9. The only other upgrade I’ll do is bumping my memory from 4gbs to 8gbs. Since the original subject was harddrives, I use a sata 320gb 7200rpm drive for my system and a separate internal 320gb 7200rpm drive for audio. Hope some of this info helps.
Graham,
I’m currently using a MacBook Pro 15″ 2.66GHz INtel Core i7 with 4GB RAM and a LaCie Firewire 800 external harddrive with an Mbox 3 Pro running Pro Tools 9 on OS X 10.6.8
Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of erros in Pro Tools regarding buffer size, and also am having some latency problems. I’ve optimized my computer for Pro Tools, adjusted the buffer size up and down, used delay compensation, made tracks and plugins inactive, the works.
I have a few large sample libraries, EWQL Symphonic Orchestra and Omnisphere that are also running off of the same external harddrive, and I’m thinking that may be the problem . Is it inefficient to use the same harddrive for samples that Pro Tools reads and writes audio to? If so, is the solution to get another hard drive, one for samples and one for audio, and daisy chain them? I would like to keep the massive sample libraries off of my internal drive. Thanks!
CP – It sounds like you’ve found your problem. It may just be too much running off the same hard drive. I don’t use huge samples like that so I can’t speak directly to your problem, but it’s worth asking around on the DUC forum at Avid.com
Is USB 2.0 fast enough to handle like 8 channels of audio at the same time? sounds to me that it would be slow but I have never tried it.
USB 2.0 is technically “faster” than firewire 400. Just handles info a bit differently. It should do the trick.
Wait. So if i have a laptop I could record to a usb if my internal harddrive is too slow to handle 8 channels of audio at the same time? If that’s true than I have opend alot of doors right now!
Simon – Most DAWs show better performance when you record to an external drive rather than the internal one.
can you use a western digital tb hdd thats usb3.0 on a g5 to run pro tools sessions on? or do you need firewire for that computer.
I can’t confirm, but I’m pretty sure the G5s don’t run USB 3.0. Firewire is a safe bet.
I know they don’t have 3.0 the hd runs 2.0 on 2.0 computers but has the 3.0 capability. Really what i wanna know is can i use the 2.0 usb on the g5 to run pro tools sessions from the drive. It has a rpm of 7500 I believe. So will it run as smoothly with that as it would with a firewire hd.
The read and write to the drive is what I’m question will the 2.0 write and read the same as the firewire 800 or 400?
Avid doesn’t usually “promote” USB hard drives, but I’m sure you can get better performance from a USB external than running it all on the internal drive. It’s worth hunting around the Avid support forum.
Hello there. How do I need to configure my system?
-imac 2.4 ghz
-PT 8
-I use Komplete sample library
-internal HD and 1tb OWC HD
Whats the best way I should coonfigure my system?
I need help please!
How about usb 3.0
Not sure since I haven’t tried it. I would check the avid forum to see if someone has!