Do You Use A Separate Hard Drive For Audio

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ken7
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Do You Use A Separate Hard Drive For Audio

  • Yes

    Votes: 279 82.1%

  • No

    Votes: 61 17.9%
  • Total voters
    340
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Ken7

New member
I understand that's the professional way, but for light home recording where you will not be processing 20 tracks or more and lots of soft synths, do you really need an external Hard drive?

I have a Laptop with an internal 7200 rpm Hard Drive and I have just started testing it out with a few songs using Vocals and backing tracks using the internal drive, with some effects and so far everything is running smooth using Sonar.

Thanks
 
If it's working for you, that's great. But personally I wouldn't want to put all that additional wear and tear on my apps drive.
 
I keep project files, and some other content (my website backups, etc.) in addition to the audio on my secondary drive.
I also do a little work on my laptop, but I keep it all on the main drive there (then again, the stuff I do on there is almost all softsynths).
 
I'm going to.(external) but how exactly do you record into the external HD?
 
MadAudio said:
If it's working for you, that's great. But personally I wouldn't want to put all that additional wear and tear on my apps drive.
Click to expand...

Same here, even though the internal drive can handle some of the projects that I might do, I still like to do the audio on an external. Less wear and tear as was said.
 
lyricist said:
I'm going to.(external) but how exactly do you record into the external HD?
Click to expand...

Just root your projects session to the external drive and fire away. :)
 
Yes and no.

I'd rather not use the internal drive, but I have a laptop and do quite a bit of moving around. I do both depending on what my needs are. Large projects that need outboard equipment typically just go straight to the external drive that lives with the equipment. Projects that I want to have quick access to typically go on my internal drive.

The topic has me thinking, though. Maybe a small bus powered USB drive would be a good idea. No use wearing out my system drive because its convenient.

-C
 
This is one of those subjects that seems to have a fair amount of misconceptions attached it.

Some years ago SCSI drives, which were faster (10,000 RPM) and more robust, were often the choice for media streaming and storage for large video and audio production environments. Adding additional drives was absolutely critical for the large sessions created in those environs. In many ways the need for these multi SCSI drives was the inception of the "external drive" recommendations we so often hear of today.


As drives became faster and their chipset controllers better 7200 RPM drives slowly replaced the MUCH more expensive SCSI solutions. The need for external drives remains but the reasons have to some extent changed.

It's important to note that external and a second internal drive are an interchangeable description in this situation.

The primary reasons for an external audio drive are 1) Maintenance. Defragging is an essential component for keeping audio drives streaming properly. It's a relatively painless procedure to defrag a dedicated audio drive. It is a much more daunting task to to keep an application drive that contains audio files defragged. I try never to run diagnostic utilities on an internal application drive as the result is OFTEN more problematic than the issues originally at hand.

2) An obvious sub-component of the above scenario is a properly running applications drive that is not required to seek and stream fragmented audio files while simultaneously required to run an application will cause far less headaches during those critical recording moments.
 
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If you are referring to using an external harddrive as a second drive, I'll agree with you. However, there exist valid performance reasons for using a second harddrive on a seperate controller for audio, i.e., disk 1 as the master on IDE controller 1, and disk 2 as master on IDE controller 2.
 
I have a second drive for my audio,but its an internal swapable drive that lets me take out the hard drive with a twist of a key,one of those cheap swap cases.

works well.
 
i've got 2 HDs, one 80gig and one 250gig (both 7200 rpm). the master (C) drive is the 80 and i use that for pretty much everything (programs, documents, etc). the 250gig slave is used for audio and project files pretty much exclusively. ...my itunes archive is on the 250 as well, but that's another story altogether.
 
Pinachi said:
I have a second drive for my audio,but its an internal swapable drive that lets me take out the hard drive with a twist of a key,one of those cheap swap cases.

works well.
Click to expand...
Same here except two are removable (not counting C drive); One for primary tracking, the second for back up. (The 'It doesn't exist until it's in two places..' theory. :D The trays are pretty cheap too.
Wayne
 
Ken7 said:
I understand that's the professional way, but for light home recording where you will not be processing 20 tracks or more and lots of soft synths, do you really need an external Hard drive?

I have a Laptop with an internal 7200 rpm Hard Drive and I have just started testing it out with a few songs using Vocals and backing tracks using the internal drive, with some effects and so far everything is running smooth using Sonar.

Thanks
Click to expand...

I believe it's 'seek time/read/write time' in milliseconds that's more important than rpm in determining the efficiancy of a hard drive.
 
Seek time isn't necessarily that important of a spec for audio drives. The most important spec (at least in my opinion) is sustained throughput. That means how much data can be consistently passed down the pipeline. 4 years ago as IDE drives became realistic replacements for SCSI drives, that was a spec that I had to constantly check. Most all drives back then had seek times between 8 and 11 ms, but sustained throughptus at that time varied by as much as 3 times on some drives. Now, current drives on the market all seem to be much closer in spec than they used to, and now I rarely feel the need to check the specs that closely because most all drives are now boasting pretty impressive specs. Now I look at the disk cache size, and buy drives that I trust to stand the test of time and abuse of the constant large writes and deletes of audio recording. Standard IDE drives are now capable of very large track counts with most processors giving out before the drive does.
 
Clit Torres said:
Just root your projects session to the external drive and fire away. :)
Click to expand...
honestly im still confused


r u referring to if i were to record "live" via audio?


the only thing ive ever used was crappy FL studio(aka frooty loops) and all you can do on that is save "target as" and then i could select the external drive.

sooo if im doing midi do i just go to save target as and get it to save into the external drive..or is there another way?
 
fraserhutch said:
However, there exist valid performance reasons for using a second harddrive on a seperate controller for audio, i.e., disk 1 as the master on IDE controller 1, and disk 2 as master on IDE controller 2.
Click to expand...

I have an Ultra 133 IDE controller that I used for data recovery work. Since it's faster than the IDE controller on the motherboard, I thought it'd be especially good for recording sound data to a slave drive. Although, as with any additional bolt-on PC goodies, getting it to play along with the other components can be fun.

My question is this, how big of a hard drive would be needed to record a live band (4 tracks into delta 44) for a whole 45-minute set @ 44.1? I have a bajillion 10 and 20 gig hard disks laying around. It'd be nice to use them for one session.

Boocephus
http://boocephus.blogspot.com
 
I have two hard drives.. The first hard drive is partitioned and software is installed on the boot up side and storage on the other... I store sessions on the other drive...
 
I would say if using only one drive, partition it for easy maintenance and defrag.
 
I do now, thanks to Computer Geeks having some refurb 10gig drives for $18 and a removable bay and tray for $4. I picked up two more trays for $2.99 each hoping that I will be able to get some more drives for those later.
 
I said:

My question is this, how big of a hard drive would be needed to record a live band (4 tracks into delta 44) for a whole 45-minute set @ 44.1? I have a bajillion 10 and 20 gig hard disks laying around. It'd be nice to use them for one session.


This is a stupid question because it would take 3 days to open a session with that much wav data. Live recordings will require someone to stop/start the recordings.

Boocephus
http://boocephus.blogspot.com
 
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