Posts: Computers and Technology / HP dv7-6b55dx fail

So disappointing.



I have an older model 17 inch dv7.  Pro-tools requires a dedicated harddrive to write to.  Writing to the same drive as the OS and software causes skip clicks and whatnot.  So about 4 months ago, when I was putting my protools 9 setup together I got a second internal drive for my dv7.  it was super easy to put in. it had a card edge style connector and the harddrive literally just plugged into that port and it was good to go. 



On the dv7-6b55dx however, the secondary drive port requires a proprietary sata cable be run from their proprietary sata port across to the drive.  the cable is not included with the computer nor the harddrive.  HP doesnt even have it for sale. I had to find a custom cable maker on the net and order it for 30 bucks.  Since a secondary internal drive bay is a selling point for the machine this is a huge fail in my book.  why they would let the convenience of the early model backslide to this level of annoyance is beyond me.  I have had the new machine for 3 days now and wont be able to do anything useful with it for another couple of days while I wait for the cable to arrive.



At around 20 tracks with 2 to 3 plugins each pro-tools really started to crap out on me on the old dv7.  That machine was a turion x2 with 4gigs of ddr2.  This machine has intel core i5 and 8 gigs of ddr3.  really looking forward to seeing what it can do if i ever get the second harddrive installed. 



HP FAIL!

Not including cables with SATA drives seems to be the standard these days.  It's absurd.   I can't imagine how much they are really slashing off the sale price by leaving the cables out, and I also can't imagine a situation where someone would just have a bunch extra SATA cables lying around, let alone proprietary HP cables. 





Pro Tools requires a dedicated HDD?   That's a bit extreme, isn't it?     Is that only a requirement if you're processing in real time? 

Dylan: Not including cables with SATA drives seems to be the standard these days.  It's absurd.   I can't imagine how much they are really slashing off the sale price by leaving the cables out, and I also can't imagine a situation where someone would just have a bunch extra SATA cables lying around, let alone proprietary HP cables. 





Pro Tools requires a dedicated HDD?   That's a bit extreme, isn't it?     Is that only a requirement if you're processing in real time? 

its not a requirement. on 8 it causes clicks. on 9 youll get crap out messages when its writing and all of a sudden tries to page to the OS or something.



i am not a billion percent positive, but i think that protools actually allocates chunks of the harddrive for direct access when reading and writing. it would make sense. if i was doing that much disk access, id want to skip any middle men too.  so letting the io swap back and forth between direct access and os access is probably taxing.  anyways...its HIGHLY recomended that you have a secondary internal drive.



if you were just looking to do like 5 or 6 tracks on protools se or whatever i wouldnt stress it, but if you were looking to put together a full version setup, why not drop the 80 bucks for max performance. i think the drive i got is 750 gigs for 79.99