external drives

[JesseP]

Hey im fairly new to recording but these are gonna be some newb questions. I have a new Macbook Pro (320GB @ 5400 RPM) and i have an older external drive that i was planning on using as an audio drive since i now have no other use for it. I think its only 180GB drive. What really are the advantages of using an external drive? Do you guys run the program (in my case Logic Pro 8) off your harddrive in your computer and save the audio files to the external drive or do you install logic to the external drive and run everything off that?

 

[Disease8]

Hi

Hey Jessep,
I would just keep everything installed on your main hard drive like normal and just create your new project files on the external drive so anything saved or recorded goes on the external drive but the main program is run from your main drive. Otherwise it will get annoying when you want to use the normal drive without the external. What rpm is the external? 5400 is fast enough to record 30 tracks so don't worry to much about that. Is it usb if so is it usb2?

 

[TimOBrien]

OS and apps and plugins on the internal drive.

Audio and misc. data on the external.

The goal is smooth uninterrupted streaming of the audio data.
Your OS and apps may need to occasionally hit the disk for housekeeping, and you dont want that to interrupt the streaming/writing of music data. So put the tracks on an external drive where it can go about its business uninterrupted.

If you use a lot of samples that stream off-disk, you may want to get another external drive to put them on, too....

 

[mikemorgan]

I want to jump in here whith a question too.

What about usb thumb drives? How fast can they write data? Is it fast enough to stream audio?

 

[TimOBrien]

Depends on the thumb drive. Some are faster than others and depends on how much you're trying to stream on/off of it.

Probably not what you'd want to do for big projects, but you can experiment for yourself...

 

[dgatwood]

The fastest USB flash sticks I'm aware of can do a little over 30 MB/sec. I'm pretty sure that this is at least a little bit slower than your internal laptop hard drive. Record to the internal drive.

External drives are okay if your goal is to have more space, but keep in mind that modern internal laptop hard drives routinely transfer data at speeds that would nearly max out FireWire 800. Don't even bother with a FireWire 400 drive or USB drive if your goal is to increase disk performance.

 

[TimOBrien]

The fastest USB flash sticks I'm aware of can do a little over 30 MB/sec. I'm pretty sure that this is at least a little bit slower than your internal laptop hard drive. Record to the internal drive.

External drives are okay if your goal is to have more space, but keep in mind that modern internal laptop hard drives routinely transfer data at speeds that would nearly max out FireWire 800. Don't even bother with a FireWire 400 drive or USB drive if your goal is to increase disk performance.

Go back and read my post above.... the downside is when your OS or apps need to do housekeeping, stop recording, slew over to another point on the disk to do that and then have to go back to streaming your audio again.

This interruption of the data stream is what leads to pops, clicks and complete data dropouts. NOT a good thing.