Newbie: Firewire Drive Help

This is my first post. In a few weeks I'm scheduled to get a Digi 003 Factory system. I'm coming from a Roland VS2480 system. I've been recording on various tape platforms since the early 80's. I think the 003 system is very powerful for the money and can do more than my VS2480. I am going to run PTLE on a Dell system (3.0Ghz P4) and will use external firewire hard drives for my audio files. I'm also planning on buying a Focusrite Liquid Mix to offload some of the work from my CPU. I went to the Digidesign site to look at firewire hard drive compatibility and tried to find some of these drives at places like pricewatch.com, pcnation.com, etc... From my experience with the 2480 forum, users usually know the best places and the best prices, so I thought I'd try here first. Can anyone help guide me to a place where I can get the right drive the first time and the best prices? I'll probably buy 2 drives and daisy chain them and use one for quick backups. I'm also planning on buying a firewire interface card (currently thinking about an Adaptec cardO) for my PC too. Any info on that will be appreciated. Thank you! Bob

I might have forgotten to mention that I have a Dell tower. Am I trying to use too large of a drive with an 003 system, or should I be using a smaller drive, like 200-250GB? I really don't think the Digidesign site was specific enough about the drive qualifications, as it was pretty vague. The drive specs don't mention what chipset is used with their drives. Am I making more of this than I need to? I just don't want to buy drives that won't work with my system. Does a list of proven drives exist anywhere in the user group? I am planning on updating to a least 2G of RAM. I also understand the need to partition large drives. Thanks! Bob

I've just acquired a WD My Book Pro 500 GB (+/- $.50/GB) based on the recommendation of the My Book drives by spkguitar of this forum. It works. I sympathise over the inability to find chipset info on drives. There really isn't a user-updated formal list that I know of. I use an (approved) Micronet 160 GB FW, the WD and an internal ATA Samsung 250 GB, all of which work if unpartioned. I got the WD to supplant the use of the internal Samsung drive that worked just great BEFORE I made an Acronis partition on it, after which it was unusable for PT. The WD drive works fine unpartitioned, and I recall that Digi recommends against using partitioned drives for recording. I will say that the Quick Install pamphlet that was packed with the WD drive was a disappointing and inaccurate waste of a tree.

Thanks for the posts. Since I wrote my last post, I decided to buy an SIIG firewire adapter card. They list the card on the Digi website as being compatible. I also was thinking about buying a smaller FW drive for my main drive and a larger FW drive to use for backups. I still don't know what drive to buy. I heard bad things about WD and I called Seagate and the guy didn't have any of the info such as; access time, or the chip set available. This is the company and he didn't have the info. He assured me the drive had less than 10ms access time and it had the Oxford 911 chipset, but he didn't have the specs in front of him. He didn't seem to know what he was talking about. I've read numerous posts that PTLE doesn't run very well on a PC, even to the point that the person said it was nice software, but too bad it didn't work. The last thing I want to do is buy something that won't work. So, bottom line, does PTLE work on a PC and how much headache will cause? I also read that the way PTLE deals with latency is by shutting off the Aux'es and plugins while recording. Will it allow the plugins to work in the Liquid Mix while recording? ThankS Bob