External Hard drive Question (GB)

[Carcass29]

I just wanted to know if anyone knew anything about external hard drives. I currently use a Sony Vaio laptop and I wanted to get more power using a backup HD...what should I be looking for as far as GB is concerned? I want to make this my dedicated HD to run Protools with plugins without always having to mess with buffer settings....anybody lend some advice? Thanks
*Buying a MAC is not an option either*

 

[MX582]

ive got 2 of the 80GB Fantom drives.. http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Fantom-Titanium-FireWire-Hard-Drive?sku=241560

depending on what your doing you might wanna go alittle bigger but for now the 2 drives work fine for me.. these drives are pretty fast too i dont get any latency problems..but then again im using a mac

 

[006]

The best thing I can say is do NOT get a Maxtor. Thats just a huge no-no. Also, some people have great results from LaCie, others get crashes, they are very hit or miss. The best performance I have ever seen are the 4 year old Glyph drives we use every day here. They are 160GB a peice, and have never given us any problems. They are 7,200RPM. You should also check out Western Digital's Raptor series, the 74GB 10,000RPM drives fucking rock. You can put them in an external case with a FireWire 400/800 port and have no worries. The GB size is really dependent on what kind of work you do.

Are you just recording your own stuff? Or do you have bands come out to do demos? If it's for your own stuff, with the occasional friend(s) doing stuff, I would personally shoot for the 74GB Raptor from WD. 10GB of hard drive space gives you hours of recording time/space at 24/48...so really if you think about it you don't "need" a huge drive. We have several 160GB drives because we do a shitload of work. Sessions at 24/48, and sometimes 96kHz, with everything on the drumset mic'ed, 4 tracks of rhtyhm guitars, 2 tracks leads, 2 tracks of bass (1 di and 1 software modeled), 2+ tracks of vocals...all with plugs, busses...all kinds of shit. Plus our policy is to keep each project after it's finished for two weeks minimum, unless more time is requested...so we're talking a 10GB (easily) session, being held for two weeks, and in two weeks, we can have two more sessions added to a drive. A lot of people opt to pay us the extra $50 to hold their session for 4 total weeks just in case they need anything done to it. So...we have basically two whole drives just full of sessions being held, and then one drive is a dedicated tracking drive. Meaning every session gets tracked to that drive, and when it's finished, we back it up on DVD, then move the entire folder to one of the other drives for storage.

Sorry to be so long-winded about it, but it's really all about what you are doing. Home project or what? Albums or demos? You'd be surprised at how little hard drive space you would need to hold several sessions.

My recommendations are WD Raptor, Glyph GT and 050 series. Other people have had great luck with other drives, but I'm just speaking from personal experience.

~e.a

 

[Carcass29]

Nice, thanks for the run down. It's mostly at home use demo-ing and such...I just want to run a shitload of plugin's ie* Hardcore Bass, DFH and some others without the whole "power" thing being an issue. It limits my creativity as of now to what I can produce. Do the Firewire connections interfere with PT's at all since it's USB? and Western Digital's Raptor series, the 74GB 10,000RPM 74GB...think that's enough?

 

[_RiseInside_]

my Lacie d2 160 gb triple interface external hard-disk is, in fact, a maxtor. Elephant audio said not to get a maxtor. That makes not to get a lacie ( if the disk is maxtor ). It´s giving me several problems btw. I regret the money spent on it.

 

[006]

RiseInside - yeah, see some people get a LaCie that kicks ass and runs flawlessly, and others get a complete firewire paperweight. I don't know why they are still in business...

Carcass - Well, you have to realize that yes, the samples used for DFH and Hardcore Bass are kept on the hard drive...but...they are pre-loaded into your RAM when you startup the plug-ins. So getting an external drive won't help with that, you need more RAM. If you want a drive to track on/use for storage of the samples in DFH/HCB then yes, get an external drive that's dedicated for audio.

The USB and FW thing won't interfere with anything at all. I use to run an external Glyph drive (USB2.0) along with my 002R (FireWire) on my PowerBook every time I did a session, no problems. Like I said, 10GB of space alone gives you like 16 hours of recording time at 24/48, which is the samplerate I use all the time. So, multiply that by 7 (for 70 gigs), and then do stupid math to figure out how much 4GB will give you time wise...basically a lot, . Over 112 hours of recording time @ 24/48.

The Raptor drive is not cheap, and I can see why you could be hesitant on getting it. But you have to realize it's 10k RPM and it's a freakin' tank. This thing has like a 4.5ms seek, extra thick platters, and the actuators basically never fail. Like I said...a tank. For the money, it's a great buy..don't let the storage size scare you...I'm telling you from experience by running my own home project studio that 80GB is plenty to record friend's bands plus your own stuff. If you're doing only your stuff 74GB will be PLENTY, especially since you have an internal drive to store old projects of yours on. The Raptor is money well spent. Can't go wrong at all.

~e.a

 

[Carcass29]

Oh...so maybe I should go for more RAM then...I just want everything to run smoothly.....thanks once again, very informative.

 

[006]

Yep. No problem man, always glad to help out!

~e.a

 

[JeffTD]

I'm sorry, but the whole "Bash the Maxtor" thing is getting really old.


I work in IT - I deal with 2-3 crashed HDD's a day.

9 times out of ten, it's a fuckin Western Digital! Western Digital and IoMega are the ones that crash the most, the Maxtor's tend to be solid.

There's nothing 'wrong' with Maxtor drives... they may be a bit more finnicky or picky than other drives, but by no means are they bad drives. If you keep them clean, degragged, properly formatted, and generally take care of a drive like it should be, it'll run fine, unless it's a bad batch, which all companies have. Drives are incredibly fast spinning platters of metal, with a head reading them. They're not made to be bounced around or jarred, exposed to static or other kind of charges, kept in areas too hot or cold (68-70ºF tends to be optimum), or kept in really dusty areas. Computers tend to get dusty and warm inside - you need a good cooling system, room for ventalation, and to dust the inside every 2 months or so.

That said, my 500G LaCie FW400 drive kicks ass - nothing but great experience with it, as well as the other six 500G and and two 1TB drives we back the servers up onto.

 

[DNW]

The company I work for uses Maxtor HDDs in a lot of our digital video recorder products. These are DVRs to go on trains 'n' shit for capturing surveillance footage from the cameras. We go through hundreds of these HDDs, for projects both local and international.

We might get plenty of shit going wrong, but actual HDD failures are quite uncommon.

I've got a 120Gb Maxtor for my apps drive, and have had no problems in the 2 years or so that I've had it.

 

[kev]

Add to this i've never had a maxtor die on me- only a seagate!

 

[DNW]

Actually, I have to correct a mistake I made... my apps drive is now a Seagate. Had to replace a smaller drive back in the day, and went with a Seagate.



So I'll give the thumbs up to Seagate too.

 

[tgs]

RiseInside - yeah, see some people get a LaCie that kicks ass and runs flawlessly, and others get a complete firewire paperweight. I don't know why they are still in business...

I think this is because Lacie don't use the same drives all the time, I read it in a review not too long ago. Can't remember what brands they said they usually ship with but I think one of them was IBM Deskstar.
I have two Lacie 250Gb USB drives and they are very different. One of them is a bit more noisy and the worst thing about it is that it "disappears" for the computer now and then for a second or two, after which the computer finds it again and starts with the autoplay thing again.
The other one works better, it's more quiet and I haven't had any problems at all with it. I use both drives for backup exclusively so I'm not so dependant of steady flawless operation, but still...
I haven't opened the things up so I don't know which kind of drive is in which casing.

 

[JeffTD]

Haha you guys are great.

Do you guys realize that Maxtor and Seagate are the same company?

 

[Aaron Smith]

I do know that a drive has to be at least 7,200 rpm if you want to be able to track to it. The bigger sized iPods (I think at least 40GB) are 7,200rpm I think, and with the firewire plug for it, I've been told than it's completely possible to track and run audio sessions from one. That said...I don't think I would ever want to entrust an important session, or any kind of session, to a tiny little iPod! I've also heard from many sources that the Oxford 911 chipset is the best drive chipset to use in correspondance with audio/video sessions.

 

[006]

But Jeff, I can understand your point, but I highly doubt you have Western Digital drives that were being used for audio purposes being brought in becuase they took a dive bomb on the owner. Every single Maxtor/Seagate drive I've ever had in a computer has bombed. Every single one. Every Single One. Now, every WD drive I have ever owned, STILL WORKS TO THIS DAY. So it's not a "Bash-the-Maxtor" or whatever kind of thing, it's more of a "every-single-maxtor/seagate-I've-had-fucking-blew-monkey-balls-and-kicked-the-bucket-as-opposed-to-every-western-digital-drive-I've-ever-owned-still-works-to-this-very-day-and-I've-never-had-a-single-problem-with-one-of-them" kinda thing.

All arguments aside, Glyph drives own everything else. So what's the point in arguing about crap?

~e.a

 

[006]

Also Jeff, I'm sure LaCie puts more care into their 500GB and 1TB drives than they do their mass distributed 120GB drives which apparently have random drives put in them. And LaCie can deliver some good drives, it's just I've already lost count on how many times I've heard about one going bad, and it seems it's like 50/50 for their performance, either you get one and it works, or you get one and it doesn't. Some people get lucky, some don't. That's just what I've seen in the past 6 years or so with LaCie.

~e.a

 

[kev]

Haha you guys are great.

Do you guys realize that Maxtor and Seagate are the same company?

different drives Jeff, and missing a vital point- Seagate only recently took over Maxtor- May 19, 2006 in fact . Therefore the drives manufactured by the new super company are probably not even on the market yet, let alone failing

 

[JeffTD]

EA, Yeah, none of it was for audio... it's just general office use, but somehow the WD's manage to crash more. I do remember you saying your old Windows PC you had actual fried or melted... now, if the Maxtor drives you had in there were failing, that's not Maxtor's fault at all. I still fail to see how your processor could have melted, or fried, unless you seriously neglected it - even if it is a Dell. (Who happen to have excellent customer service from a corporate standpoint, which I find hilarious, as they hate individual users.)

That said - I've very rarely had an HDD physically crash - that's a rare thing. You can get reader errors and little fuckups, but an actual crash (reader falling onto the head) is a rare occurance for any drive manufacturer.

That said, your point about LaCie putting more care into the 500G and 1TB drives does make sense. I've popped my personal 500G open, actually, and there were 2 250G Maxtor ATA drives in there, so go figure.


All that aside, I find it extremely hard to believe, unless you bought them all at the same time and got a super fucked batch, that every Maxtor drive you've had has failed, and that every WD still works. Computers are finicky... it's more about tricking them into doing what you want to do half the time when it comes to that kind of crap. It'll never come down to a black and white "Maxtor sucks, WD works" kind of thing.

 

[006]

Believe it or not...the three WD drives I have that I bought about 3 years ago are still in use to this day, one is my dad's pc, one I gave to a friend, and one is in dead Dell I have....all still work. The 5 or 6 Maxtors that I have bought over the years have all just stopped working, I had one reader touch the head and that thing was just gone...I had one just mysteriously stop working, sent it to Maxtor and they said they could recover the data for like $1000US...at the time that was the normal price, nowadays it's much cheaper, so that gives you an idea of the time frame I'm talking about...I mean they just stopped working, crashed, or reader touched the platter...all rediculously unacceptable. The information you put on your drive may mean jack shit to Maxtor, but it could be the most valuable info on the face of the planet as far as you, the consumer, is concerned. And when the past 5 drives I've owned from Maxtor have bombed out and I've lost everything on them, I would never buy another one, nor would I trust one that I had to use. Plain and simple. My personal experience with Maxtor/Seagate drives has been just horrible. I'll never buy another drive from them again. Maybe I am just *that* unlucky with them...whatever the case, I won't trust their drives with anything of more importance than say the backup of a spreadsheet for last year's expenses.

Also, just to add...every single one of the drives I've ever owned, be it Maxtor or WD, they have been treated the same way and been used for the exact same purposes. So it's not like the Maxtor drives went through hell and the WD's were being used to store photos...

~e.a