Looking for suggestions for a powered USB external hard drive for audio, 7200RPM only

S

Soulgolem

Member
Hello, just got my macbook :D works great, I can't wait to record some music with it, got my eyes on a firewire powered interface, the ultralite from MOTU. Since I'm going for powered hardware, I though I should also get a powered external hard drive too, that would make things a lot simpler, all power would be drawn from my laptop. I just can't seem to find a 7200 rpm one for audio, any suggestions ? I know they're out there, just so many brands and all thought I'd ask before looking intensly on this one,

thanks, Francis.
 
Soulgolem said:
all power would be drawn from my laptop.
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You probably have your terms interchanged.

When you talk about a 'powered hard drive' that usually means an external adaptor or other power source, not your laptop. Most laptops don't have large enough power supplies to power anything but the internal components.

The MOTU interface you're considering is a good one, but will almost certainly not be able to take the power needed to run it from your laptop.

Here's a LINK to an online computer store that I've dealt with satisfactorily, and you can search there for an external USB 2.0 7200 rpm hard drive.
 
ssscientist said:
You probably have your terms interchanged.

When you talk about a 'powered hard drive' that usually means an external adaptor or other power source, not your laptop. Most laptops don't have large enough power supplies to power anything but the internal components.
Click to expand...

The term should have been "bus-powered" hard drive. While the MBP does have plenty of power budget for powering an external laptop-size hard drive, you probably want a desktop drive for performance reasons. No computer on the planet will power a desktop drive (31.2W) over FireWire, though it is within the theoretical specs.... You'd either have to use a PCI Express (PCIe) slot or more than one PCI slot to power such a FireWire card, though.... :D

In fact, I once calculated that if you tied all the USB, FireWire, etc. ports on a typical laptop together, along with the CardBus slot, you would have almost enough power for the spindle start current on a full size desktop drive (without actually powering its circuit board).

There are bus-powered audio interfaces. M-Audio makes several. You probably can't realistically power that and an external HD, though. I've never tried, but I'd be pretty surprised. The MOTU ultralite is a bus-powered interface. Remember that your battery life will be significantly shorter when powering an interface. :D

Also note that there are bus-powered laptop HD cases and there are bus-powered laptop HD cases. I have one that won't spin up unless the battery on my iBook is almost full and another one that works just fine.

Final note: there's no such thing as a bus-powered USB hard drive (or at least not with standard hard drives). USB doesn't provide enough power to spin up a hard drive (microdrives and possibly those little 1.4" PCMCIA-sized drives from an iPod notwithstanding). FireWire, yes. USB, no. (Well, there are some sort-of "bus-powered" USB hard drives, but they involve splitter cables and plugging into the PS/2 port or some other port for additional power.)
 
Thanks for the advice, maybe I'd be fine with the internal hard drive considering i'm just recording tracks and will be mixing on a desktop. Though I really want a bus powered interface, really like the ultralite from Motu, but since it has only two mic pres, how can it record drums, I'll need more for that, but I mainly will be recording one or two tracks at a time. Heard there were midi problem with the Ultralite combined with the Intel based macs, might only be the first shipped batch, forget where I heard that... oh yeah, the review section of musiciansfriend, can anybody confirm this ? Cuz I'm about to buy it !!
 
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