Recommend a good harddrive for recording

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dogbiscuit

New member
Hi folks,
I'm planning to rebuild my system quite soon. I think I'm going to go with an Intel Q6600 processor as I've been reading good things about them. Now I'm wondering what harddrive folk can recommend for recording with Tracktion?
Think I'm gonna go with a 250 - 350GB.
 
look for the ones with the largest on board buffers... there are some that also use a ES designation dont bother with them it's got something to do with "enterprise solution"
 
advice for new 2,5" internal HD

Hi there,

I'm running out of disk space on my Macbook Pro (Hitachi 160GB, 5400rpm). So I've been looking at Samsung 500GB/5400, 400GB/5400 and 320GB/7200rpm hard drives to replace my current internal drive, because I want to have all audio data on my internal drive. Are there people who already use this kind of HD in their macbooks for recording? Any problems to be expected? I would also really love to speed it up a little more so it can handle more tracks and plugins at a time. Would there be a big difference in performance between the three models mentioned above? Or is there a better option?

Thanks for any tips!
 
Using your main system drive as an audio drive isn't the greatest idea. It's always better to have another hardrive to lay the audio to.
 
dogbiscuit said:
Ok cheers for that. I'm currently using a Seagate but I heard somewhere that Raptor is good for recording. Anyone got an opinion on that?
Click to expand...

raptors a fast, but noisy. I run all seagate 7200's and have never had any problems with the transfer rate. Most tracks i've recorded at once though is 10 - so may have to take that in account.
 
Well, I like to be mobile and always have all the audio I need internal. Keeping my setup as compact as possible while staying efficient. It is also meant to be used for live situations, where I already have to struggle with lots of other periphery (guitars, basses, amps, effects, keyboards, several midi controllers, audio interface etc).
Why do people consider it to be so much better to use external drives for audio?

By the way I just ordered the 500GB Samsung for a very low price. I hope it will be fast enough. Actually for me recording to my internal disk hasn't been too bad 'til now, just would be cool to have a little less glitch/latency and some more disk space. Anyways, thanks for your thoughts, I'll see how it goes, when I get it.
 
doghouseplayer said:
Why do people consider it to be so much better to use external drives for audio?
Click to expand...
Because you want a drive dedicated to writing audio. The system drive will have to stop writing audio to take care of the other thousand things it has to do in order to keep the operating system and the program running. It's just not very efficient.
 
Farview said:
Because you want a drive dedicated to writing audio. The system drive will have to stop writing audio to take care of the other thousand things it has to do in order to keep the operating system and the program running. It's just not very efficient.
Click to expand...

There are a lot of tradeoffs, though. I mean, if you're using eSATA, then yeah, it's a clear win. For everything else (FireWire, USB), there are tradeoffs. USB will suck processor cycles like a Hoover (the vacuum, not the dead POTUS). Both FireWire and USB add additional disk I/O latency that can cause odd glitches in some DAWs (and have lower maximum transfer rates than SATA).

If you're comparing to an internal laptop drive, an external desktop drive is probably a win. Comparing with an internal desktop drive, though, it isn't.

The amount of I/O to your system volume should be very nearly zero (occasional system log data writes notwithstanding) while recording. If it isn't, you don't have enough RAM and that should be the very first thing you fix before you even think about adding a hard drive to improve performance....

There's only one good reason to keep audio on an external drive: ease of backups. Otherwise, you should use a second internal drive. If that's not possible, you're probably better off using the system drive than an external drive unless you have a slow system drive or are using a laptop.
 
dgatwood said:
There's only one good reason to keep audio on an external drive: ease of backups.
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That is absolutely not true. It's no less easy to backup audio from the C drive than any other. :mad:

That being asserted, keeping the C drive clear of extraneous work while running apps is a no-brainer.
 
Wow, cool! dgatwood has me on his ignore list! How do I know? Don't forget, I'm the one who discovered the connection between rep points and the ignore list! :eek: :D
 
dgatwood said:
There are a lot of tradeoffs, though. I mean, if you're using eSATA, then yeah, it's a clear win. For everything else (FireWire, USB), there are tradeoffs. USB will suck processor cycles like a Hoover (the vacuum, not the dead POTUS). Both FireWire and USB add additional disk I/O latency that can cause odd glitches in some DAWs (and have lower maximum transfer rates than SATA).

If you're comparing to an internal laptop drive, an external desktop drive is probably a win. Comparing with an internal desktop drive, though, it isn't.

The amount of I/O to your system volume should be very nearly zero (occasional system log data writes notwithstanding) while recording. If it isn't, you don't have enough RAM and that should be the very first thing you fix before you even think about adding a hard drive to improve performance....

There's only one good reason to keep audio on an external drive: ease of backups. Otherwise, you should use a second internal drive. If that's not possible, you're probably better off using the system drive than an external drive unless you have a slow system drive or are using a laptop.
Click to expand...
I missed that he was using a laptop. I was talking about extra internal drives.
 
Thanks for all your replies! I actually have an external lacie HD with about 300GB capacity and firewire. I don't know how fast it spins though. So maybe I will use that for recording stuff and move the files over to my internal 500GB HD afterwards. I'll give it a try and see how the performance differs from recording to the internal one.
 
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