SATA/IDE Hard Drives:
This one is simple. Buy a PCI SATA or IDE controller and have at it. Your SATA controller will show up as a SCSI controller in the System Profiler as SCSI Bus 2. Some SATA/IDE controllers allow you to boot off of the drive while others only allow you to use drives as file storage. I personally run my main OS on the SCSI Cheetah drive to ensure compatibility, and I also use a Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card for a fast SSD. The SSD has two partitions: one formatted to Mac OS Standard which is my universal backup drive, and another formatted to Mac OS Extended which I’ve titled Pro Tools Drive. The latter volume's name gives away what it’s used for.
Since the 9600's internal SCSI bus is rated at 10MB/sec, plus since not all SCSI drives can get close to that speed, an additional HD on the external SCSI bus may be needed in order to have all of your Pro Tools tracks playing back without dropouts. It’s been recommended in the past to not simultaneously boot off of, run Pro Tools on, and record to/read from your main system drive. Digidesign has always recommended using a separate drive for that (it can be on the internal bus, no problem), but I use just my SSD for all of my Pro Tools audio files and it works fine.
NOTE:
If you’re using an IDE or SATA controller and you’re booting off of the drive connected to it, you’ll most likely encounter a message every single time you boot up saying that the Mac was improperly shut down. Even if it’s not true, you’ll still get the message. Nothing is wrong, it’s just how the 9600 reacts because it doesn’t like SATA controllers for some reason. You can turn this message off in one of the control panels so you won’t have to click OK every time you boot up.
This one is simple. Buy a PCI SATA or IDE controller and have at it. Your SATA controller will show up as a SCSI controller in the System Profiler as SCSI Bus 2. Some SATA/IDE controllers allow you to boot off of the drive while others only allow you to use drives as file storage. I personally run my main OS on the SCSI Cheetah drive to ensure compatibility, and I also use a Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card for a fast SSD. The SSD has two partitions: one formatted to Mac OS Standard which is my universal backup drive, and another formatted to Mac OS Extended which I’ve titled Pro Tools Drive. The latter volume's name gives away what it’s used for.
Since the 9600's internal SCSI bus is rated at 10MB/sec, plus since not all SCSI drives can get close to that speed, an additional HD on the external SCSI bus may be needed in order to have all of your Pro Tools tracks playing back without dropouts. It’s been recommended in the past to not simultaneously boot off of, run Pro Tools on, and record to/read from your main system drive. Digidesign has always recommended using a separate drive for that (it can be on the internal bus, no problem), but I use just my SSD for all of my Pro Tools audio files and it works fine.
NOTE:
If you’re using an IDE or SATA controller and you’re booting off of the drive connected to it, you’ll most likely encounter a message every single time you boot up saying that the Mac was improperly shut down. Even if it’s not true, you’ll still get the message. Nothing is wrong, it’s just how the 9600 reacts because it doesn’t like SATA controllers for some reason. You can turn this message off in one of the control panels so you won’t have to click OK every time you boot up.