External Hard Drive Purchase Help

Status
Not open for further replies.
JohnnyAmato

JohnnyAmato

New member
Need some serious help here. I've reached the point where I definitely need to get an external hard drive; for back-up mainly, I'll look into running sessions from it once I get it, but the main concern is back-up. I have 30+ sessions on my PC, and not backed up at all. So obviously, I need to change that.

I've done plenty of research, but would like to know what some you of here use, or would suggest for me.

Here's my set-up:

*Pro Tools 12.3
*HP EliteDesk 800 G2 TWR PC 64-Bit
*Intel Core i5 6500 CPU @3.20GHz @3.20GHz (Why 3.20GHz is listed twice in the description is beyond me, duel core?)
*16 GB RAM
*1 TB Hard Drive (not sure what kind/brand of hard drive though, SATA, I believe)
*8 USB 3.0 ports, 2 USB 2.0 (funny, my iLok only works in the 2.0 slots, but that's neither here nor there)
*No Firewire or Thunderbolt ports, but 2 Display ports (monitor is HDMI, had to get an HDMI to Dispay adapter to use the monitor, but again that's neither here nor there...)
*Windows7 Pro (Service Pack 1)
*This PC is offline

I'm sure some of that info is irrelevant, just thought I'd include it all.

I've done the research on a few, some people like SSD's, some don't. AVID reccomends the OWC Mercury Elite, there's also the Glyph Studio, and the Transcend MLC. And I'm sure a bunch more.

Again, my main concern is back-up. And if I ever upgrade to a new/better PC with Windows10 or above, having all your sessions on an external drive makes it easy to transfer/use the sessions on the new PC, correct? (I was also thinking of eventually getting the UAD Apollo 8, which only runs on Windows10 I believe, so a new system would be needed)(I think I need Firewire or Thunderbolt ports for this as well) But even if I never up-grade, back-up is still obviously needed.

Anyways, I'm ready to buy the drive now, just don't want to make the wrong purchase. I've been to my local Micro Center, but wasn't thrilled with the selection, and I don't think BestBuy would be any different. Looks like it will have to be ordered.

Any help/suggestions?
 
I keep everything on a couple RAID 1 (mirrored) boxes in the closet. I've got a small (2.5") pair for audio projects in a fanless box and a pair of 3.5" in a small enclosure with a fan. Both spinning media using USB 3.0 so quite fast access, and as they're mirrored, I'm stuffing my head in the sand and calling that my backup. (I know, I know, but it's a *hobby* for crissakes.)
 
keith.rogers said:
I keep everything on a couple RAID 1 (mirrored) boxes in the closet. I've got a small (2.5") pair for audio projects in a fanless box and a pair of 3.5" in a small enclosure with a fan. Both spinning media using USB 3.0 so quite fast access, and as they're mirrored, I'm stuffing my head in the sand and calling that my backup. (I know, I know, but it's a *hobby* for crissakes.)
Click to expand...

Thanks Keith, yea I like the RAID idea where whatever you put on one it automatically copies to the other.
 
you know who said:
try PC world mate, thats where all the muppit go to buy there trash nower days

____________________
anyway hear are the facts
WHEN I POSTED MY WORK OF A COVER OF ADEL ROLLING IN THE DEEP UP FOR A REVIEW a member on hear who was kind enough to give me the time of day
to review my singing and offer constructive critisum. AND HE SAID THE MICK WAS BAD THERE WHERE 3 NOTES THAT WHERE OUT (PITCH)
AND I WENT AWAY AND REPLACED THE MIKE AND CHANGED THE NOTES and this kind person reviewd my singing again and acnolaged that it was
much better and I had fixed the problem.

AND THEN INSTEAD OF ACNOLAGING MY PROGRESSS MY HARD WORK YOU FUCKING ****! YOU DICIDED TO SEND THE BULLY BOYS IN STATING THAT I WAS UNABLE
TO RECONISE PITCH (YOU FUCKING LIEING BASTARDS, SHIT ON MY CUNTS!!!) AND UNABLE TO SING AND MY WORK STUNK AND I SHOULD GIVE IT ALL
UP NOW BEFORE I MAKE A FOOL OF MY SELF AND THE ONLY THNING IN LIFE I AM CAPABLE OF IS COMMITING SUISIDE (AND YOU HAVE COVERED THE EVIDANCE
UP AGAIN BY REMOVING THAT THREAD YOU FUCKING LITTLE BASTARD!!!)
Click to expand...

What is with this dude? He just posted in like 10 different threads...

(You can delete this post too if ya want Jimmy, no need for it)
 
I started using one last winter because I literally ran out of space. However, instead of just picking one up and calling it a day, I would definitely examine file/program space and keep the largest things on the external disk, like Superior Drummer and all its associated files, for example. That program alone took up an insane amount of space. The slight downside to it (and it could very well just be my exHDD model) is that it'll take a few secs to load a new drum piece or preset kit. No issue whatsoever in writing drums or mixing them, or even playback, just with loading presets and pieces. Instead of instantly loading the new kit, it takes about 4 seconds. Big deal.

I am using a WD Elements 1TB. It contains all my drum files and all songs/project files older than 6 months. My disk drive is now something like 80% free. Everything runs beautifully.
 
HDD spinning drives are great. Just have multiples for backup if you wish to never lose your data.

I keep hearing others say that they don't fail, and if they do, the data is easily retrieved. Hell no... From a bad experience I know that to be not true.

Backup to an external drive, then backup that drive to another backup drive. Redundancy is better than loss of data/music files...
 
StarTech Dual 2.5/3.5in Hard Drive Docking Station SATA LN81897 - SDOCK2U33 | SCAN UK

Something like the above gives you flexibility to buy hard drives where you can get the best deal and Scan are good people to deal with.

"They" say you are not properly backed up until your data is in three place? Local BU drive, drive in another location and in The Cloud!

A dock allows you to conveniently swap drives, one of which should contain an image of the current system drive.

I have read that R.A.I.D. is not all that useful for music files? But I am just an old valve amp fixer.

Dave.
 
ecc83 said:
...
I have read that R.A.I.D. is not all that useful for music files?
...
Click to expand...
Seriously, what does that mean?

What kind of music files - my iTunes catalog or DAW projects? What level of RAID? And, most important, why wouldn't it be useful?
 
keith.rogers said:
Seriously, what does that mean?

What kind of music files - my iTunes catalog or DAW projects? What level of RAID? And, most important, why wouldn't it be useful?
Click to expand...

Oh! I don't know! I used to fix annyloggy amps! Something about it either takes up twice the disc space or/and it is only half the speed of a single drive?

Apologies if you are using it and think it the best thing since bread-***-cut, just reporting something I read? What forums are for? Wheat from chaff?

Dave.
 
Dave, that sort of thing was called "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) in marketing cicles and elsewhere back when I was working for the man.

So, no, it's not half the speed. It might be marginally slower in RAID 1 because there's a slight overhead (in firmware) to manage writing the incoming data to two separate drives, but if you have fast enough drives with reasonable buffers, and, importantly, on a modern, faster than USB 2.0 bus with no other traffic, not tailed off some hub, there is no way it will impact your performance in any noticeable fashion. I have my video projects on RAID 1 drives, and only 5400 RPM ones at that. I've had audio on the RAID drives for a year and a half now, and actually had one drive fail (tried using something scavenged from a pile that had been laying around - all I know is it came out of a notebook once upon a time) and I simply replaced that drive with no loss of a single bit, rebuilt the set and kept on chugging.

And, well, yes, it takes twice the disk space, but we're talking about backups here, so isn't that going to take up more disk space as well? Sure, I could buy a single 5TB drive to back up both my audio and video projects, but I like the idea of keeping everything separate, and since the audio experiment worked, doing the same for video seemed like a reasonable choice (for me). I will quote Wikipedia here, just to be clear that I'm not saying this is a backup solution!

While most RAID levels can provide good protection against and recovery from hardware defects or defective sectors/read errors (hard errors), they don't provide any protection against data loss due to catastrophic failures (fire, water) or soft errors such as user error, software malfunction, malware infection. For valuable data, RAID is only one building block of a larger data loss prevention and recovery scheme - it cannot replace a backup plan.​

(Note, RAID 0 offers almost 2x performance gain, but doesn't have any recourse if a drive fails. If you want to have performance and redundancy, you probably need to look at RAID 5 or higher.)

Is it the best thing, well, no, probably not because I've got all the drives plugged in all the time, so a power surge could wipe out everything (see Wikipedia quote), leaving me with no backups, but then, given my personal habits of *never* backing up anything except when doing a system upgrade, this is a much better solution for me, because IME drive failure is more likely than a damaging power surge, and this way I know there's a hot backup all the time, vs. something I might have made X years ago and god knows if it still exists, or where.

For those of you with better habits, you can ignore my RAID 1 infatuation.
 
Last edited:
jimmys69 said:
HDD spinning drives are great. Just have multiples for backup if you wish to never lose your data.

I keep hearing others say that they don't fail, and if they do, the data is easily retrieved. Hell no... From a bad experience I know that to be not true.

Backup to an external drive, then backup that drive to another backup drive. Redundancy is better than loss of data/music files...
Click to expand...
I've had a lot of drives fail over the years.

No need for SSD's for backup drives. These are great for operating system drives and the drives that you have samples on, but they are overkill for backup purposes.

For backup, it doesn't really matter. But you do want USB3, just so it doesn't take a million years to back things up.
 
Yup ^^^ ...just get any old external drive for backup...and you should really get a couple so you can have a double backup, and/or if it's really critical to you, put the second one in a different place (I would carry my 3rd backup drive in my work laptop bag every day.)
They are small and light...not a big deal.

Most important...back up after every involved session where losing the work would leave you in tears. :( :)

I have an internal drive for interim backups, so I can do a quick safety copy when working...but always back up to my two externals when I've done more substantial work.

Oh...I personally would not recommend 3TB external back up drives. Don't get anything bigger than 1TB, which is still pretty damn big.
Reason is...you will accumulate too much shit on the one massive drive...and when you need to look for stuff or copy everything over to another drive or just attempt to organize shit...it will take forever.
And speaking of organizing...do it...from the git-go have a logical, common sense, easy to understand organized folder structure, and then follow it when you make backups. It might be a PITA to get going when you already have a lot of stuff...but once you create a nice folder structure, it's easy to stick with it, and WAY easy to find things and maintain the organization.
In my IT work I've seen some horrific piles of folders/files on people's computers...with cryptic names, and multiple sub-sub-sub-sub folders, all using the same names...etc...etc... :facepalm:
Be neat...it sounds pansy, but with folders and files neatness really counts.
 
Not trying to be a tight wad, but you can back up quite a few things on flash drive. You can also make one bootable, in case your main drive crashes and you need to get to your data. You can get cloning software that backs everything up, or lets you select what to backup and because they are getting larger all of the time, you can back up quite a bit on one drive.

It is said that you don't have a proper backup unless it's in three places with one of those off site, in case of some kind of disaster. You can have your backups sitting up on a shelf, but if you have a fire or tornado, they all get torched or blown away along with the computer. But, that scenario is geared towards a company that would be dead in the water, if they lost everything. If your studio data is that important, you should look into getting something at a bank for one copy of your backups.

You should also think of the son, father, grandfather system. This way, you can keep several backups, and when you overwrite one, you still have two recent backups, in case you delete something by mistake or some file gets corrupted, etc. And, sometimes you can backup a corrupt file and not even know it, so this system is a way to help remedy that.

Brand new drives do crash and while a warranty will get the drive replaced, the data is your responsibility. I've had two WD drives crash just about a week after the warranty ran out. Talk about one pissed off musician. This was back in the IDE days when we were still talking about megs instead of gigs. It still sucks.

When I was in the computer department of a mortgage corporation, our accounting firm literally grilled me about our backup system. I did the server backups and I had a suitcase in my house, with the "off site" backup tapes. I would bring the oldest backup to work each day, wipe it just before using it to backup the whole system again. Everything was done at the last minute, just in case there was a reason I would need that oldest tape for a file.

I did all of the necessary uploading data files from that day to the main frame and then downloading the new files, once they were ready. I copied all necessary system data to another drive in one server before each process, just in case something happened in communication with the main frame. This would allow me to do a quick restore and start over, if something didn't work as it should. We were communicating via a satellite dish to the main frame on the east coast. Things can go wrong. Just a rainstorm changes the shape of the dish and all data stops moving. And these were huge data files and one little glitch would ruin the whole process.

In addition to a back up tape that I took home with me, I would also copy the fresh data one last time to another hard drive, after everything was done. This was another backup that was quicker than using a tape to get a file. And I wouldn't get a phone call to wake up and take the tape to work, either.

So, along with the son, father, grandfather system, I had three versions of system data within easy access, in case they were needed. You'd be amazed how often things don't get noticed until people get to work the next day and something somewhere doesn't work. It was a wholesale mortgage corporation. We loaned money to banks.

Even with all of the backups I did and copying everything to different hard drives before and after each process as well as doing a backup on tape and taking it home with me, the accounting firm was still worried about our system. You see, I only lived about 10 minutes from work and they didn't really like that. I guess just in case we were attacked by the Russians and they dropped a small nuclear bomb on my area of the city?
 
This is such a great thread. Not because i'm learning much but just to see where everyone's head is.

Music backup is such a funny thing, to me. Okay, tax returns? Sure, every digit, forever, etc. Certain documents, records, images, and receipts? Sure, same thing.

Over the years, i've had several different backup techniques. At one time, capturing every take of every track, etc. But then something odd happened. I kept every midi track, but found the difficult part became finding a dependable *interface* capable of extensive midi, and a software platform capable of running it. I kept lots of audio and found it more difficult to keep a dependable DAT deck than anything. Or a SCSI card. IOW, sure discs crash, but sometimes it's just as bad when they don't.

USB has been around longer than any format, so it's probably entrenched enough to work for another decade, maybe two. I keep a NAS pack that I've tried RAID in several formats finally settling on JBOD.

And then there's the nagging question of what to backup? Because i came to the realization that there were popular songs I really liked. Would it matter if there was a scratch copy somewhere? Not to me. These 'releases' of studio practice tracks and demo tracks from all these big name groups is something I don't care for in the least. If that's the case, then why would i care about mine? That is, once the song is *finished* -- final master -- what do I care to keep? Maybe some sheet music for fast reference. Maybe a midi file or two for a particularly awesome solo. An unvarnished sample, maybe. But take 4 out on track 31? Nope. It's my gift to the ether.

So now, I have a project or two, backed up on two active drives in the JBOD and sometimes on a Cold Drive. Never clouded. Everything else, a life's collection of works, fits on a 32G stick, even in several simultaneous formats (.mp3, .flac, .aiff, etc.) with plenty of room to spare. Sure, I'll keep a copy of that, but have never needed it.

My music setup is solely music. No chat, drawings, taxes, or anything else. Backup is easier now than it's ever been. Memory is cheaper than worry.

P5
 
I've been using Western Digital drives for 2 decades with 0 failures. Knowing how to perform routine maintenance on a drive and spotting the early warning signs of failure helps.
If you do lose a drive, it can almost always be recovered (e.g. The FBI does this routinely with all kinds of drives, even those lost in fires, water damage, etc). It's just a matter of knowing what tools are out there and how to use them. I'd never be concerned with a failed drive other than the hours needed to get it back, but it will be back.

Some feel larger drives are more prone to failure, and that makes logical sense, but the data doesn't really back that up. Personally I'd buy a WD Passport and call it a day. I've had mine (1TB) for five years and zero signs of any issue. You don't really need RAID, but you should have backup software that runs daily, weekly, and monthly to replace any changed files. Redundancy is good. I put my albums on a backup flash drive (cheap, $10), that I keep in my car should a fire ruin my equipment. I don't back that one up daily, but just keep the raw original recordings on it. Worst case I can at least get those back.
 
I don't think there's any use in comparing brands when talking about external drives. You don't know what's inside. There might be another brand of disk, or even another brand of USB controller some day.

When you want to know about failure rates of naked drives, have a look here:

2017 Hard Drive Failure Rates - What the Numbers Tell Us

I'd also try to avoid RAID. Whatever level of RAID your use, chances are very big your data is toast when the controller fails. RAID isn't for backup, it's for speed, and/or redundancy.

I buy naked drives in quantities of four, at least. Question of having a spare harddisk controller to replace another one if the controller fails. I use these drives with a SATA dock. Those are cheap, exist in USB, eSATA, firewire and thunderbolt, so they're pretty future proof.
 
"I've been using Western Digital drives for 2 decades with 0 failures. Knowing how to perform routine maintenance on a drive and spotting the early warning signs of failure helps."

Is it just me or do others think that sentence is oxymoronic?

And I don't have the resources of the FBI, not even MI5!

Dave.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top