Recording drive recommendation

connolly

New member
I am upgrading my home studio (StudioOne 4.5, Faderport 8, Apogee 88 and a new iMac with 32 GB RAM, internal 512 GB SSD, Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.0. Can you provide me specs for a suitable external recording drive for small projects (10 to 15 tracks with a few software plugins)? Specifically, what size and read/write speed? SSD or rotational drive? Should I consider RAID? Is there an advantage to connecting via Thunderbolt 3 or is USB 3.0 fast enough for recording? Thank you in advance for your help.
 
Hi,
Do you need them to be external for portability? If not, I'd work from the internal drive.

The old advice was always to have a separate drive for system/sessions/samples but really size is the deciding factor these days.
Your machine should laugh at 15 tracks and a few plugins.
 
Just to be different, I always record onto an external drive. I have three at the moment, and none are anything special. Nor have I experienced issues with very large track numbers.
 
I use external RAID (1/mirrored) enclosures for my projects. Connected via USB 3.0. Works fine.

Spinning media is cheaper and *maybe* faster for writes in some situations, but I don't know. They both have their pluses and minuses. One thing I'll say is that a couple of spinning drives is going to make noise, so you better have a quiet place to put them if you don't want them in your recordings. Not a problem if you've got a real studio with separate control room, but I do not. The enclosures are all in a closed closet.
 
Thanks for all the replies. I don't need the external drive to be portable. My older spinning drive will only be used for backups so I will turn it off during recording. Thanks for the advice! I think i will go for an SSD for the recording drive
- - - and still thinking about the RAID 1 option.
 
With the speed of ssds these days, the only real reasons to use external media are for portability, size, or for raid/backup purposes.
There's no spinning disc that's going to come close to competing with 2gb/s in each direct that you'll get with a new imac and its SSD.

If you don't need portability or additional mass storage I'd just use the machine as is and take a manual backup of each session when it's done, or at intervals.
If raid appeals to you then fair enough, I can't argue with that. :)

PS: If you're trying various solutions, take a look at BlackMagic Disk Speed app.
It's a very quick and easy way to get an idea of how fast, or slow, a drive is operating.
Just choose your drive, hit start, and you'll see something like this.

Screenshot 2019-06-22 at 15.13.43.jpg
 
Just to be different, I always record onto an external drive. I have three at the moment, and none are anything special. Nor have I experienced issues with very large track numbers.
External via USB caddie or..?

My current rig is C plus two audio drives inside. I'm def looking forward to getting all SSD and getting that noise down.
 
Does anyone use an independent drive for their sample libraries? I'm wondering if I can load those libraries on the same SSD that I use for recording projects if it is large enough. Or should I dedicate the recording drive for recording activity only?
 
I have a 1TB sample library SSD for EW Orchestra stuff. It's max SataIII speeds. (about 500 each way).
Pretty much no way around that one because the libraries are huge.

I do, however, keep smaller libraries on the system disc, like DrumCore/StevenSlate etc

Before I bought the big EW libraries I didn't bother with a dedicated disc for samples,
but I did keep a dedicated second SSD for sessions, mostly for reasons of space/size.

The thing to remember is that most of the advice about multiple drives is from a time when 7200rpm spinning discs were giving you 100MBps r/w on a good day, with relatively slow seek times.
Now, I'm not saying there's no need for separate discs ever; There are lots of times when that's a great idea,
but if you're running a new-ish pcie-SSD at >10X the old spinner speeds, it's going to be capable enough for the average HR setup.
 
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Wow that's interesting. That opens up some options as I was under the impression USB wouldn't have enough bandwidth.

I've got two 1TB drives connected via USB that I have had for a long time.

I recently got another 2TB external drive that's hanging off another PC, and discovered curiously that I was able to record through my network to that drive without issue.
 
One of the incidental advantages of physically separate drives (and indeed multiple partitions) was having the OS and DAW as all you would touch in the event you needed a format and re-install. Folks don't really have to do that much these days?

Dave.
 
Anything like sessions/samples should be backed up somewhere, whether the main copy is internal or external.
For applications/documents/user settings MacOS has a migration tool that's very straight forward, although I've never had to use it myself.
In the event of a total drive failure all that stuff would have to be done manually but that'd be the case regardless of where sessions/samples are.

My MacOS install is the same install I've had for about 12 years. It's like the brush that's had two new handles and three new heads but it's the same brush. ;)

I take a full clone of it a couple of times a year, just in case, but I've never had to use that either.
 
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