Please share your hard drive wisdom

[Gloopikat]

Hello all, I've got a few concrete questions regarding external hard drives/brands/set-up options. I've failed so far to find similar answers on here, although there are plenty of similar questions.

1. Why do people talk of an external sample drive as well as an audio one? I only use a limited array of popular rim shots and bleeps, while the rest I synthesise myself, so there appears to be no need for a separate storage space for samples alone. Why can't I keep them on my external audio drive? Isn't it less cumbersome for the DAW on the internal drive to only communicate with one external drive, instead of two? (I mean besides the backup drive).

2. Because my macbook pro (mid-2009, 17 inch 2,8 Ghz, 4GM Ram) obviously isn't bursting with ports, does it make sense to have an audio drive and a backup drive in one neat RAID enclosure e.g. OWC? It would seem that less CPU is wasted that way, since less ports are engaged.

3. Finally.... OWC, Glyph or G-Technologies? The last one seems too attractive in price to really be good, while Glyph is just too damn expensive for the mixed reviews everyone gives it. OWC so far seems like the fastest, most economically fair option. And getting back to my previous questions, its cheap ability to enclose 2 drives seems like the ideal option for Audio + Backup drives in one place.

And which models would you suggest? I'm not looking for more than 1TB for Audio.

Thanks for your time!

 

[bandcoach]

There are really only two reasons for maintaining different hard drives for different aspects of production - spin up time and write time

Generally a sample source drive is being read from and you may flit around the drive to do this - but once the sources are in ram they generally do not need to be accessed again

A project drive is mostly used to write audio to and so it is writing to the disk as a contiguous sequence

If you are trying to both read and write to the disk, you are burdening the system with two layers of access - hence the push to separate drives

If you only want one external disk, then sample storage should be on the internal drive

as for drive choices

go with what you can afford - my money has been on glyph for a while as they have some pretty amazing endorsements and their tech specs are also rock solid

OWC and G-Tech look the same to me (in fact the only obvious difference is branding)

 

[Gloopikat]

I see! Focused too much on the aspect of CPU usage to realise the underlying reason - that samples are read, just like all the other stuff on the main drive, and therefore burden a drive that is used exclusively for writing. Face-palming in shame.

Ok, so - Glyph.

Would you recommend enclosing two drives (projects + overall backup) in one external enclosure? Or do I risk hurting the other drive if some electrical fault hurts the first one, or the shell?

Thanks Bandcoach, always to the point.

EDIT: And what do you think of Glyph's internal powering on the later models? I wouldn't want to defeat the point of an external drive by having the computer power it. Am I correct in assuming that an external power supply is always the way to go, or does Glyph somehow circumvent that (given their almost exclusive focus on creative work)?

 

[bandcoach]

For me, separate purposes = separate drives - easier to replace 1 if dies or otherwise has a problem than it is to replace when part of a package....

As for using buss power vs wall power - I prefer wall power 99% of the time - especially if I am using it for serious work. I have two portable drives, one is buss powered (a Toshiba 500gb) and one is wall powered (a WD green drive, which I would never buy in future - it shuts itself down if it is idle for "too" long).

I also have three network drives (NAS) using my local area network - most of this network is at 100mbps (should buy some gigabit switches ) but these drives are all connected the modem/router which is 1gbps - they are true network drives and are used by my kids as well as me for transferring files form machine to machine and saving stuff and projects for work and school - each is wall powered.

 

[Gloopikat]

Got it. Will have to plug in a backup drive as needed then.

Yes, NAS looks like such a useful thing when you have a family. Was pondering getting Apple's latest airport 'fridges' (though that's probably a SAN), but the wireless transfer rates don't make up for the price tag and the good looks, I think.

Think I'm going to get this one for audio purposes: Glyph - GPT50 Professional External Hard Drive Cross my fingers they include a power supply. And I'm guessing more than 1TB really isn't needed when it comes to working with light music files, right?