need external hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Niminah
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Niminah

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Hi, I am new to recording and have recently bought a tascam us122 mkII audio interface (usb 2.0). I am thinking about getting a particular laptop, and was wondering how necessary a second hard drive was for a beginner like me who is only going to be recording one or two tracks at a time? Is it really needed for small-scall projects? Thanks!
 
Likely not.
Of more concern would be, this "particular laptop"...
I hope it ain't one of them little net-books.
 
nope definitely not a netbook. It's got an i3 processor but only usb ports (no firewire or expresscard :( ). Definitely fast enough and I'll probably put a 7200 rpm hard drive in it as well.
 
I do all of my work on an external hard drive then transfer the files to the PC I'm working on plus the family PC and the spare one.
I've lost a nearly finished album due to power failures. So if I happen to be on another PC with the external hard drive, I just drop my files in for insurance.:D
Memory sticks and MP3 players are an easy way to transfer files too but the external hard drive has around 160 gigs.
 
If you're only recording a couple of tracks it should be fine. Even on a 5400 rpm hdd, but I would still upgrade to a 7200 rpm.
 
ok cool. I guess the other question is whether it would be helpful at all to record to an external usb hard drive while I also have a usb audio interface?
 
Hmmm..
I'm probably not getting something here but first, to answer your question. You record through the audio interface. You need that.
Now, as for external hard drives.
Mine, as far as I know, is just a storage device. I set up in my DAWs so that the files are saved on the external hard drive but the programs are all on drive 'C'.
Are some external hard drives capable of running programs? :confused:
 
sorry if I wasn't clear. My programs would all be on the internal drive and obviously I record through the audio interface. I was asking if it would be better to record/save my audio files onto the internal c: drive or to an external usb drive (because my audio interface is also usb).
 
The fact that your interface and external are both usb are in no way relevant to each other is any way, shape, or form. I can see no useful reason to use an external drive during the recording process ... just seems extraneous and unnecessary. External drives are back up tools purely. You record to the c drive whether you're using the usb interface, firewire, or even internal mic. Definitely back up your projects to an external drive when you're done with the recording process. And, like a previous poster said, drop them on as many computers as you can (just the project files) for insurance. Don't kid yourself. Those little external drives are basically cheap laptop drives. They crash. And pretty frequently as a matter of fact.
 
I'd agree, the best reason to own an external hard drive is to keep backup copies of your data files.

Better yet, use a program like Ghost to make a makeup of your entire laptop.

The time it takes to set up a system for making regular back ups is a drop in the bucket compared to the time it takes to rebuild everything after a hard drive crash - always more of a danger with a laptop than a desktop.
 
I'll beg to differ and qualify it.
When I lost my hard drive due to power failures, the external hard drive was fine. It's designed to quick release. The internal hard drive isn't.
Also, it doesn't put any load on the PC during recording. The files are saved when the DAW is idling. Every 5 minutes or whatever you choose in some DAWs and also on request.
If anything, you are actually freeing up your main hard drive where the actual programing is going on but it doesn't really make that much difference either way.
 
My external hard drive is actually as big as my "C" drive.
The main advantage to me is that it's easily transferable to other PCs. Don't really have an opinion on which is best though but it serves my purpose.
 
I use an external HDD & it's 5 times bigger than my C drive.
I save the "bundle" of a project to the external. I have the recording/mixing software on a few computers. If I want to mix, add something, tinker on a different computer I just take the external drive, plug it in & open the bundle. The bundle unpacks then sets itself up on the desktop & away I go.
I may/may not save the bundle to the C drive of the comp I'm using as well as to the external.
I've lost a few projects & whole computer drives to viruses, crashes etc so I'm cautious. I also save the entire bundle to DVD when the project is "finished" just to be secure - in the likely even that I'll want to tinker in a year or so.
I'm using an old program (cakewalk Pro Audio 9.3) so there are probably others that can/will/would/do it it smarter & better BUT for me it works fine. I don't have to worry about introducing additional latency etc etc.
Laptops are hazardous in my opinion. They're built to last 3 years usually, everything is squished in & almost everything is a compromise (hence you needing USB interface etc) in addition to the fact that they are small, have small screens and aren't as robust as you'd expect.
I have one - a 2nd hand one at that - that I've set up so I can record with it (sketches, field recordings & the like) but it's not something I enjoy using.
 
I record directly onto an external...no problems..its 7200rpm so what difference does it make?


when Im away (as in the last 3 months) I record onto a netbook...no problems..a sony Viao, it outperforms desktops from 2 or 3 years ago and no one had difficulties recording then....only thing is 120gb memory fills up quickly
 
Hey Niminah:
That was a pretty cool site you posted there. Even has our very own Tim O'Brien. At least, I thought he was our very own. Seems he's been blogging around.
I joined. :D
 
A decent portable solution would be one of those two-drive raid enclosures. Basically, you install two identical drives of your choosing and it appears to your laptop/desktop as one drive, and the data is on both drives simultaniously. If one fails, your data is still on the other drive. If the enclosure fails, you simply move one or both drives to another enclosure and you're back in business. Some of them can take four drives and use raid5 instead of raid1 (mirroring), but are larger of course.

Also, mirrored drives generally are faster than a single drive for reading data because both drives can be accessed for the reads, giving the software/OS two paths for the same data. Writes are slower because both drives have to be written to.

Since I don't use a laptop in my studio much at all, and my home studio is not portable, I use an actual server, with 14 sata drives configured as raid 5 using a hardware raid controller which reduces processing overhead on the server itself.

If I were to copy a 1gb video file from my studio PC to an external drive then compare it to copying the same file to this server, the throughput is not quite twice as fast - 45% faster. This is because servers use all sorts of fancy caching algorithms and also large raid arrays (many drives) get written to in parallel so that reduces the time. Of course one should use gig E ethernet to get the maximum benefit if you go this route.

Anyway, tangent aside, I would consider an external raid1 drive enclosure with two drives - losing your data sucks. I've been down this road many times myself and it really does suck.

Whomever suggested "Ghosting" your laptop was spot on as well. If you don't want to buy Norton Ghost there is a linux-based freeware package that essentially does the same thing, and it's called "clonezilla". I use clonezilla professionally with great success.
 
Great suggestions for backing up data, I've had some problems losing stuff in the past as well! However, another aspect of using an external usb drive from what I read was to record to directly so that you have uninterrupted writing (no windows processes), preventing recording hiccups. Do you guys use multiple hard drives for this reason as well?
 
I obviously don't know a lot about it but I know what I do and why. (Lost my data).
I simply go into the preferences of my DAWs and select folders on my external hard drive as the storage points for projects.
What the PC actually does during recording? I don't know/care. I'm keeping up.
I let the DAW put the temporary files in it's default folders. I've read that they cause fragmentation and I don't clean up the external hard drives nearly as often as the internals.
I'm getting a lot out of this thread though.
Thanks, all. ;)
 
No reason to record on an external drive? It may not be for everybody, but there are situations where external drives come in handy. For example...

I set up my project at home and saved it to an external drive. I took the external drive and plugged it into my DAW at church. I recorded 10 tracks @ 44.1/24 to the external drive (which is USB) with no problems at all. The drive is 120GB, 7200rpm. It has firewire, but the computer at church would not recognize the drive using firewire.

So conclusion...........there are purposes for recording to external drives and USB can handle at least 10 tracks @ 44.1/24. :p


Now I just wish the direct outs on the mixer were pre-fader, pre-eq, pre-insert:(......but that's another story. :D
 
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