MOTUnation.com

a fellow MOTU user (with an 828) told me that you can hook an external hard drive directly up to your MOTU via the unused firewire jack (the other is connected to my computer) and it will save all the sound files directly to the hard drive, making the whole recording and playback process much quicker (a "night and day difference" he says).

so, before i go and spend $150 on an external hard drive, is this really possible? i didnt see anything about it in my 896HD's manual...

have any of you done this?

i appreciate any feedback.

Well how else would you hook up a firewire drive if it werent hooked up to a firewire port??

Im sure 80% of us at least are recording to firewire drives..
And yes they work just fine.

I'm sure you will see a difference if your saving your tracks to a drive other than your "c:" drive or whatever the OS is running from...

Hooking a drive up to the MOTU does not mean the files go directly to the drive. The file still travels thru the PCI buss then back to the drive, while you might get faster thru-put, the files are still going to only move as fast as the slowest part of your computer.

You could always get an HD recorder, that would solve everything...