Macbook pro

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paulq

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Hi there, i am looking at purchasing a mac book with logic.

I am wondering if the 5400 rpm drive is fast enough to record up 10 audio tracks simultaneously for drum tracking??

I would of thought this wouldn't be a problem but I have seen some posts on here saying that you should upgrade to the 7200 rpm drive

Thanks
 
paulq said:
Hi there, i am looking at purchasing a mac book with logic.

I am wondering if the 5400 rpm drive is fast enough to record up 10 audio tracks simultaneously for drum tracking??

I would of thought this wouldn't be a problem but I have seen some posts on here saying that you should upgrade to the 7200 rpm drive

Thanks
Click to expand...

I would get the SSD version or a 7200 rpm drive.
 
My experience with 5400 drives is that they'll probably be up to snuff for the start of the session, but there's a good chance they won't make it to the end, depending on your track and effects count.

I have a MBP and I just removed the optical drive and fitted a pair of SSD.

If storage is important and the optical isn't, you could look an at SSD and a 7200 500gb or something.
 
Ok thanks.

By optical drive do you mean the standard 5400 drive? apologies for my err.. newbieness! also is there much of a difference in performance and capabilities between a 7200 rpm drive and the ssd? im only recently trying to make sense of these different types of drives:facepalm:
 
Optical drive is the CD/DVD drive.
You can buy a caddy which replaces the optical drive and houses a second hard drive.

I've been using SSD for a good while now, and for system drives at least I would never go back.
For storage 7200 would be fine for me. Speed isn't critical for backups etc.


Of course you could just have an SSD system drive and a usb or firewire storage drive.
 
oh right i see what you mean now, I think i would like to keep the optical drive. I have been looking at some thunderbolt external drives for £170 ish but i was wondering if could replace the 500 gig hdd drive with an ssd and then use the 500 gig hdd as an external?
 
You could totally do that.
I actually did that for a while before the optical thing.

If you buy an SSD drive and a 3.5" sata enclosure you'd be set.
Thunderbolt is nice but I wouldn't worry too much. I still have my little 5400 drive in a USB caddy and it's fine for session transfers etc.
 
You should ALWAYS be recording to a secondary (not the boot) 7200rpm drive.
Your boot drive has the OS and services and apps that have other things to do.
You want to record to a drive that is doing NOTHING ELSE.
Smooth, uninterrupted flow of data is your goal.
SSD's are not magic, they still stream data one item at a time.

Best setup for any daw (windows, osx, anything):

OS, apps and plugins on boot drive
Sample libraries on a second separate drive
Audio projects and tracks on a third separate drive.
 
im still not sure im understanding the secondary drive part correctly.:facepalm:

If I have an ssd drive as my main drive in the laptop and the old 5400 as an external drive....which one is doing the work? I had it in my head that the external drive is for storage purposes, but if you a recording to that external drive then is that not doing the work? Or am I being a turd :confused:
 
People split the load so they'll have the operating system and programs on the main drive, and maybe they'll have their session, audio, and sample libraries on another.

I can't say this isn't a good idea, but I haven't found it to be necessary since I moved to SSD system drive.

I keep audio,sessions,applications, samples etc on my OS SSD, and all my backed up crap on the second drive.
 
TimOBrien said:
You should ALWAYS be recording to a secondary (not the boot) 7200rpm drive.
Your boot drive has the OS and services and apps that have other things to do.
You want to record to a drive that is doing NOTHING ELSE.
Smooth, uninterrupted flow of data is your goal.
SSD's are not magic, they still stream data one item at a time.

Best setup for any daw (windows, osx, anything):

OS, apps and plugins on boot drive
Sample libraries on a second separate drive
Audio projects and tracks on a third separate drive.
Click to expand...

Could i get away with just buying a 7200 rpm external drive and keeping the 5400 as is?
thanks for the info
 
I guess.
It depends what kind of demands you're going to put on your laptop.
I guess most people (here) would find the limits of a 5400 soon enough, but why not just see how it goes and upgrade later if it's not happening for ya.
 
Steenamaroo said:
I guess.
It depends what kind of demands you're going to put on your laptop.
I guess most people (here) would find the limits of a 5400 soon enough, but why not just see how it goes and upgrade later if it's not happening for ya.[/

Ok I think I'll do that first. I can see me using at least 8 mics for a drum kit and by the end of a track I'm expecting to be running at least 30 or so audio tracks with guitars and vocals. Would you say that is a reasonable assumption?
Click to expand...
 
You may as well play it by ear.
If you're recording at your leisure you can't loose.

If you're running a business, upgrade once at the start. ;)
 
I used a 5400rpm drive in my Macbook for a while with not too many problems. Eventually my hard drive fried and I had to replace it, so I put a 7200rpm drive in.

Ideally you would want to have your hard drive in your computer for everything and anything, and then a second hard drive connected to your computer (via firewire or similar) strictly to record your sessions to. Some people swear by this, but I record to my computers hard drive (7200rpm keep in mind) and haven't had any real problems.


Steenamaroo said:
You may as well play it by ear.
If you're recording at your leisure you can't loose.

If you're running a business, upgrade once at the start. ;)
Click to expand...

I second this. Try it out and see if your computer can handle what you need it to. If it can, good; if it can't, then you can start swathing/adding things.
 
I record straight to the 5400rpm drive in my MBP, sure on bigger sessions I need to make sure that Live is the only thing running, but to this point I have had no problems at all. You don't need a 7200 or SSD, would it be an upgrade yes, and the most ideal setup would be the one paulq mentioned, I'll be switching to that as soon as my MacPro gets here...
 
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