external hardrive

[heismn32]

A lot of people suggest to have an external hard drive for your home studio. My question is what are some quality but not so expensive hard drives out there? And also, by getting an external hard drive, what does it exactly do? What is the advantages in having one?

[Innovations]

There are two things to think of: performance and convenience.

There is no performance advantage for an external hard drive over your internal one. The drive itself is very likely the same unit. So if you already have enough drive space for your tracks then you are fine. If you have internal expansion space for an additional hard drive then you will save money by getting an extra internal drive.

The convenience advantage to having an external hard drive is that you can transport it from one computer to another. For example you can record on your hard drive at one studio then carry to another studio for other tracks and then to yet another for mixing.

However be concerned about interface speeds. If you are using a USB interface to connect to your audio interface do not get a USB external hard drive! Or if you do record temporarily to the internal hard drive and then copy it to the external hard drive while you are not recording.

edit...added following:

When looking at differences in cost they are likely to be caused by:

1. Different quality of the underlying drive, although if you look at the retail prices of drives they are pretty close from different manufacturers

2. Different interfaces. SCSI, Firewire, USB, USB2 all have different prices. USB1 is too slow for live recording.

3. Premium name brand and markup. This is probbably the largest factor.

4. Warranty...usually goes along with 3

[KevinTran]

Originally posted by Innovations
However be concerned about interface speeds. If you are using a USB interface to connect to your audio interface do not get a USB external hard drive! Or if you do record temporarily to the internal hard drive and then copy it to the external hard drive while you are not recording.

Inno,
If you're talking strictly USB, I'd agree. But I have a USB 2.0 external HD and it's fast as hell. Faster than Firewire by 20%.

kt

[Innovations]

Originally posted by KevinTran
Inno,
If you're talking strictly USB, I'd agree. But I have a USB 2.0 external HD and it's fast as hell. Faster than Firewire by 20%.

kt

absolutely, but even so I would be wary of putting, for example, both my edirol USB sound interface and a USB2 external drive on the same interface even if it were USB2.

When it comes to your sound interface you just do not want to have any contention for the bus.

[heismn32]

So should I get a USB 2.0?

[Innovations]

If you are getting an external hard drive then yes, either USB2 or firewire. However you may not need an external hard drive at all, and if you have an external sound interface then I would not share whatever bus it is on with anything.

[borednbuzzed]

It's good to have the external drive so you can save all your music on that and not on the same HD as your OS and all your program files... If you system crashed and burned you'd still have all your stuff saved on an external drive. I've only been recording for a year or so and it's saved my ass once already.