Specifications

Appendix A: Connecting SCSI Drives 79
appendix a
Connecting SCSI Drives
SCSI hard drives are the recommended record-
ing media for Pro Tools TDM systems.
Although Pro Tools will let you record to your
system drive, this is generally not recom-
mended. Performance for recording and play-
back on system drives is worse than on non-sys-
tem drives, resulting in lower track counts and
fewer plug-ins.
SCSI hard drives offer several advantages over
dedicated ATA/IDE or FireWire drives. First, SCSI
drives can be external and therefore provide
portable audio storage that is easily moved be-
tween systems. Second, SCSI drives offer better
performance when recording to large numbers
of tracks; recording a large number of audio
tracks with an ATA/IDE drive results in a short
delay before recording begins.
SCSI Requirements
For maximum recording and playback perfor-
mance, Digidesign recommends qualified SCSI
hard drives and a qualified SCSI host bus
adapter (HBA) card or (on Windows systems) a
qualified built-in SCSI HBA connector on the
motherboard.
Qualified SCSI drives yield up to 32 tracks per
drive with 24-bit audio, up to the maximum
number of tracks for your system configuration.
SCSI drives must provide a data transfer rate of
at least 9 MB per second of sustained through-
put.
Visit the Digidesign Web site (www.digide-
sign.com) for a list of qualified SCSI hard drives
and SCSI HBA cards:
Software RAID is not supported for audio
drives.