To Tojo: External Hard Drives

KineticSound

KineticSound

The VOICE
I'm planning to work on a project that will be recorded at a friend's studio, then the audio files transferred to my home studio for editing & mixing. I originally planned to upload the files to .mac from his studio and download them on my end, but some of the project files may get rather large, so I'm starting to think that a portable hard drive would be a better/faster option for the file transfer.

Tojo, if you're reading this, you had a thread going back in October contrasting a few different HD options. Our setup is nearly identical - Apple Mac running Logic 8 - and I'm curious:

1. What features were you looking for when you started the HD search?
2. What did you end up getting?
3. How has your experience been recording directly to the external HD? Are there any tips you can share or things I might need to consider?
 
KineticSound said:
I'm planning to work on a project that will be recorded at a friend's studio, then the audio files transferred to my home studio for editing & mixing. I originally planned to upload the files to .mac from his studio and download them on my end, but some of the project files may get rather large, so I'm starting to think that a portable hard drive would be a better/faster option for the file transfer.

Tojo, if you're reading this, you had a thread going back in October contrasting a few different HD options. Our setup is nearly identical - Apple Mac running Logic 8 - and I'm curious:

1. What features were you looking for when you started the HD search?
2. What did you end up getting?
3. How has your experience been recording directly to the external HD? Are there any tips you can share or things I might need to consider?
Click to expand...

hey! i was a little surprised seeing a thread addressing me, but that's cool, i'd love to help (what with me asking the same question earlier as you mentioned). so i'll try and answer your questions as best as possible:

1. The features I wanted
  • it had to be firewire, and it had to have two firewire ports. this way i could daisy chain other audio interfaces (or a video camera which worked successfully
  • I wanted something that also had usb 2.0 just in case , so I could use it pretty much anywhere (everyone has usb... not everyone has firewire
  • it had to be 7200 rpm for a fast stable drive for audio recording
  • it had to be at least 300 gigs ( I ended up getting a 500 gb one)

2. I ended up getting a mercury elite-al-pro from owc. It's all right here

I wanted to get the smaller version from owc that was bus powered but it's more expensive (because it's bus powered) firewire on the go pro 2.5" hard drive

3. Recording to the external hard drive seems fine so far. I have firewire plugged in and that's how it is writing to the drive and playing back. I also partitioned my drive so that about 50 gb is a partition which I used to make a bootable cloned backup. It appears as a firewire hard drive on my desktop called "bootable drive" my other 400 gb is for audio or video. so far for audio the only thing that bothers me is that sometimes I will open up a mix in logic thats still on my internal macbook drive (I still have the projects on it) to mix it or edit. Then I have to delete the old version on the external hard drive, and then copy the updated one onto the external again. (this only happens when i'm out and don't have my hard drive for example so its not a big deal)

other than that, whenver i click fast forward or rewind the blue led light flickers on my hard drive ( probably because it has to access the data faster which effects the light making it flicker [ by flicker I mean quickly get a bit brighter and go back to normal-it's hard to describe]

so yeah, overall it seems pretty fine... the hard drive was a bit bigger than I expected but I'm totally find with that.

I hope that helps!
 
Thanks a million. I was going to resurrect your old thread but was afraid you wouldn't see it!

This is exactly what I'm after. Only after reading your post, I think once the audio is tracked to the portable drive and I bring it back home to my rig, I'll just transfer the files via USB onto my main hard drive. This should eliminate the duplicate project files that you mention running into. I hadn't even thought of the partition idea - having an extra backup drive for Time Machine would be helpful.

I'm glad you have had good luck with the Mercury. I was looking at the Iomega eGo drives, but now you've got me thinking about these Merc Elite ones as well.

Thanks again.
 
I recommend Seagate's drives because they come with a five year warranty (as, apparently do the Maxtor drives that Seagate now manufactures, in spite of the box saying three years).

External drive cases all contain hard drives from either WD, Seagate/Maxtor, or Toshiba at this point, and all those manufacturers have horribly high failure rates these days (particularly Seagate and WD, which are the most common drives in external cases), so you're pretty much screwed if you don't keep regular backups anyway. Thus, you might as well at least get a drive with the longest possible warranty so that when (not if) it dies, you can get a new one for free.

Care to guess how many drives I've lost this year? It's not pretty. Hint: it is >3 and < 5.... :eek:
 
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