Looking at EXTERNAL Hard Drives, have researched my eye balls off! Please help.

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JuicyDbase

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I am going to be buying a Firestudio, mobile mixer rack combo , power conditioner, and drives in the very exciting near future so I am going to need some storage. I will be recording through a PC laptop. I have some brands in mind but I need some opinions and advice on drives/capacity needs. I have been researching external drives extensively over the past few weeks, and with even more knowledge about what drives are available, I seem to be severely more confused about which is best for my needs!

- Here is my situation
It's hard to tell without having had any descent convenient way of recording, but I believe my band and I will be recording (very rough estimate) 20 to 40min. a week. We often move gear from upstairs to downstairs for more room. And because of that and a mixer/rack combo case it would be annoying having to always find a safe place to put an external HD with it's external power supply and plugging it into the square opening in the back of the mobile rack which is pretty inconvenient.

- Correct my knowledge if I am wrong, but isn't the highest bit rate you can record at on CD 44.1? Or would it make a difference to record higher at 96?

My requirements
- A budget of $150-$430, 430 is a fairly undesirable stretch.
- Two hard drives, one for storing information, and one to mirror it for a backup. Seagates would require two; the other brands have two inside the same casing with the capability of raid 0. I am not really sure at all on how much space I will be eating up and needing.

Drives that I think are some of the best.
- Seagate
*400gb - $170
*500gb - $209
I have had a 300GB SG drive for a while and have not really had any problems with it. The down sides being compared to other drives are that it has an external power supply, and it seems like a drive durable for a desktop lifestyle, not as robust as some others. Ups are that it is cheaper and that I have heard good things, and had good luck with my other one.

- Glyph GT 062 320gb dual drive - $419
I really like the idea of getting the rack ears and integrating the hard drive into the rack. Then it is secure, no setup, two drives in one box(160gb each), no external power supply, robust, quiet, reliable, always ready to go. Well I hear they are very reliable and robust anyway. Down sides are that they are a lot more expensive for a lot less storage space, I don’t know if 160gb would cut it.

- Western Digital
*My Book World Edition II 1TB - $430
*My Book World Edition 500gb – unsure how much $, must be cheaper than 1TB
This is pretty intriguing because it has two 500gb drives that can be seen as separate volumes for mirror backups. And to compete with the glyph in convenience, it is a network drive/server so I would be able to leave the drive with a wireless router in another room getting rid of any fan noise and also like the glyph, not having to deal with cables and setting up wherever I am. Wireless back up and transfers would be nice. The downside’s to this one is the price, and that you probably would not want to move this one around too much, but as long as I am in my house, that wouldn't matter.

- Do larger hard drives act slower?

- Do laptop hard drives lag? If so, is it better to record directly to an external firewire drive? My laptop has two internal 100gb drives.

A few other ideas.

1. I could get an 80gb glyph drive to put in the rack for mobility, and an external (backup) drive.

2. Get a pair of the 400gb Seagate’s, and just record and store temporarily on the second internal laptop drive.

3. Or I could get a 320gb glyph single drive, and a 400gb Seagate (which is only a dollar more than the 300) The problem here is that I have come up with this expensive idea and now it just goes to show I truly have no clue about what size drives I need.

If you have any advice, other ideas, or had a similar situation, please post.
 
your post could tell me more than i could tell you. i would say you'd have to search for similar uses and do more research, but you'd just end up with opinions on most of the stuff. when it comes to specialized uses for this gear, you may be on your own in regards to your application of it.

the other place is psw since they are really into building their own computer based mobile daw's but there's also a LOT more nonsense that goes on but they're 'pros' then come back here and tell us what you learned ;)
 
Yeah, I can see how specifics can single some questions out. But there is a fairly straight forward question that I have I believe can be answered here regarding the 20 - 40 min. a week of recording I am guessing we will be doing at I guess CD grade 44.1 quality. Do you know, or anybody how many gigabytes that adds up to a week?
 
A 45 minute project with ~25 tracks is only 6 or 7 gig. You'll be fine :rolleyes:
 
AFAIK, Glyph does not actually manufacture hard drives - they just make nice cases for other brands. Western Digital and Seagate external drives both live in my studio, and they have both performed flawlessly to date. I prefer the former, but that wouldn't stop me from buying another from the latter.
 
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Yeah, it’s a good thing they use Seagate’s because I have always liked that companies drives. I have thought it out in my head and It seems I would be better off getting a 320gb glyph drive so I can mount it in my rack for my mobile recording, because of durability and definite ease of use. And then I guess I will get just a normal external backup drive now or later.

Is 320gb so big that it would hinder it's performance in tracking and working with? Seems better too big than too small if it doesn't affect performance I guess, since it's not all that outrageously expensive.

Do you think normal picking up and setting down, moving around ect. of the rack case would put excessive wear and tear on the drive?
 
A FireWire drive should perform better than most laptop drives in most applications, with the exception of short read performance (where the laptop drive may be slightly faster because of a faster connection between the drive and the computer. For audio, my gut says that the FireWire drive would be a good bit faster than a laptop drive, but once you get one, you can always test both use cases and see for yourself. :)

I like Seagate as far as mechanisms go, but there's no way I would ever buy a pre-built hard drive from anybody. They A. cost way more than building your own, and B. usually have all sorts of dodgy electronics. When I look at the cases that have given people the most fits over the years, it has been prebuilt packages.

Ideally, you should get yourself a nice case with an Oxford 922 FireWire bridge from a manufacturer that provides firmware updates---e.g. Granite Digital, not some fly-by-night (usually Chinese) hack shop---and a bare drive from a reputable drive manufacturer. Plug them together, mount the drive with four screws, snap or slide the case together, putting in whatever screws came with it to hold it together (where applicable), and plug it into your machine.

By assembling it yourself, not only will you usually come out cheaper, but you'll also know exactly what bridge chipset you're using so that when (not if) somebody finds a serious bug in some bridge chipset's firmware like the Oxford disk eating bug a few years back, you'll know precisely whether your drive could potentially be affected or not.

Whatever you do, do not use a USB drive for audio under any circumstances. The extra CPU load will seriously drive you nuts. :D
 
I might have been looking else where, but the rack drive trays I saw at that granitedigital.com were without any drive in them and cost a lot more than a glyph rack drive. They did look fancy but I can't afford to spend 400-500 just on a tray. I think I will stick to pre-built, but thanks for the suggestion. When I move out into my luxurious and goddy mansion mistake of a house, I will know where to get my huge central storage units. :-D ooo, servers and cat5 running through the entire house...oops drooling off subject.
 
Off topic but apparently samsunghas made a solid state 64 GB drive, that has about 3x the transfer rate of conventional drives and 1/3 the power consumption. One could assume that these drives would be truly silent as well.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/03/27/1832222.shtml

I'd guess that for audio recording (and porbably gaming and the like as well), in the near future we will see these kinds of drives as the 'working' drive and then the files get backed up to conventional hard drives. Seems like we'd see opportunities to use these kinds of drives for page files and the like and could get some really nice performance on systems where they might be able to integrate these kinds of fast, low votage memory storage into the video cards, and other areas.

Daav
 
I buy 300 gig bare drives and then spend another $50-60 on a case with firewire. Sometimes I buy the drives fully built, too. It's really pretty inexpensive to build the drives yourself, especially if you wait for 300 gig drives to go on sale.

Don't buy anything smaller than 300 gigs. An 80 gig drive is a waste at this point, in my opinion.

You are absolutely correct to plan for a backup drive. That's excellent thinking and something that a lot of people don't do.
 
I just got to thinking about this glyph external firewire drive. If I put it in a mixer rack combo, it would be fixed to the rack, and would experience some abrupt bumps and jarrs in setting the rack down or loading it up. My question is, would typical changes in motion like this in setting a rack which I believe will weigh approx. 75 pounds. put any kind of wear and tear on a hard drive that is fixed to the rack?
 
Just like to say that I've been very very happy with my Glyph GT050.

Few things to think about:

They are not just quiet, they are DEAD SILENT. Unlike a lot of other drives that sound like vacuum cleaners and cannot be used in a studio, you have to look at the power light on the Glyph to see that its on or accessing.

The rack ears are bloody handy. Mine is in the rack and daisy-chained to my Motu828mkII; all I have to do is hook up one cable to the laptop.

They offer full data recovery and replacement for the warranty period. You ever priced data recovery services???? Think $1K and UP quickly....
 
3.5" Drive

Could you not just buy an external 3.5" case and mount a 3.5" hard drive in it. I believe the 3.5" cases require external power and a USB cable and the 3.5" drives are dirt cheap for say 160 - 500GB.

They are not truly portable but just mentioning an option.
 
I don't know, unless someone can attest to some typical externals being easy to setup and durable from bumps, I'm just not sure about the regular run of the mill externals anymore for a mobile rack when I think of it getting bumped around. Mostly for the reasons stated before, and they don't seem to be as quiet as glyphs, and the power supply is internal. Here is a link to the drive.http://www.glyphtech.com/site/products/gt050.html

I might also be able to get a glyph or other external firewire drive and strap it on a sliding rack shelf/drawer when the rack is settled in a location, and then transport it in the nice foam case it comes with.

Maybe I have an ocd complex of having to find the absolute most perfect deal or something, I just want to spend my few penies wisely for longjevity in a product...
 
As long as they're not bumped around while they're running, it should be ok. Think about laptops - When they're being moved/carried/etc... they probably get bumped a bit. Now if the drives are power on and spinning, you probably want to be a bit more careful.
 
True. TimObrien replied to a message I sent and basically said that drives are fine.
""all modern drives "park" themselves onto a head stop when the power goes down to prevent crashes. "" - TimObien
Click to expand...
I am not going to be recording while moving the thing, so I think I am safe. Now it just boils down to whether I want to spend $170 for a 400gb seagate or $319 for a glyph/seagate for ease of use and being stealthy for recording.
 
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