External Hard Drives and File transfers

[scantron]

I'm thinking of getting an external USB hard drive to transport sessions from one pc to another. Any advice/concerns? I know this is a pretty common practice now but is there anything I should look for when buying one?

 

[Cyanide-Depende]

I have a 300gb maxtor firewire hard drive that I use to store files on, the only problem is when running things in your DAW off an external harddrive you get audio dropouts on playback because of the transfer lag, so moving from one pc to another is ok, but when working on something copy it to an internal hd to work on it.

 

[bgavin]

Look into the Venus external chassis. I own two.

You can get it with USB 2.0 and Firewire, or USB by itself for a few less dollars.

The Venus chassis is very nicely done. The power connector for the standard IDE drive is laterally adjustable. Excellent thinking on their part. The chassis is also fan cooled.

Mine goes with me everywhere (I'm in the computer business). I use the other one for backup purposes. They will support at least a 400gb drive. I use the new Seagate series with the 16mb buffer and 5-year warranty. I wait until they go on sale at Fry's, then pick them up cheap with a mail in rebate.

USB 2.0 is light years faster than the older USB 1.1 transfer.