I've always made an effort to work from internal drives. The new macbook pros and others have pretty small ssd drives. Does that mean that most people now are working strictly off of a portable harddrive? Obviously your DAW and software is on the internal drives but who here is tracking and mixing off a portable hard drive? Or are some people doing a bit of both (example, always track to internal drives, but mix off of portable harddrive)? Curious to hear opinions on this.
Working From Portable Hard Drives
- Thread starter Studdy
- Start date
rvs0002
Metal from the Heartland
C_F_H_13
Protools Guru
My opinion of this is a little skewed cause I spent years not working from home, but I've always always worked off of external firewire 400/800 drives. I guess it was more of a necessity of moving studio to studio, but even when I did finally have a home setup, I still did it.
I'd always work the purchase of 2 hard drives into the budget of any record I did, one for a work drive and one for backing up.
Now I have 2 internal work drives and 2 external backups, however I still use externals fro time to time for tracking and whatnot.
I'd always work the purchase of 2 hard drives into the budget of any record I did, one for a work drive and one for backing up.
Now I have 2 internal work drives and 2 external backups, however I still use externals fro time to time for tracking and whatnot.
Erik Monsonis
Member
I always put all my project files in my USB2.0 external HDD and use them from there. Never had a problem, maybe the loading times can get a tad longer (I don't know really, as I've never tried anything different)
ze kink
THE BLACK WIZARDS
smy1
Member
rvs0002
Metal from the Heartland
That's what mine are and I've never had a problem tracking or mixing. Been using them for years.
mva801
Member
- Nov 18, 2009
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I've never recorded on internal drives. I thought it was always recommended to use an external? I've used owc mercury elite pro 500GB Firewire 800 for years. I'm always taking projects back and forth to various studios anyway so I never keep anything on my internal laptop or iMac drive.
And I almost ALWAYS have the band buy their own hard drive so I don't have to keep track of their shit.
And I almost ALWAYS have the band buy their own hard drive so I don't have to keep track of their shit.
I have always, always tracked to a second internal hard drive. Im really surprised to hear that people are tracking to an external drive. Mixing sure, but i think I will stick to tracking internal and explore mixing on external drives. I have always to this day transferred projects to the internal drive before mixing, tracking to a portable HD always seemed like a good way for errors/problems to occur during the perfect take. Obviously this isn't the case if most people are doing it. Thanks for all the replies.
mva801
Member
- Nov 18, 2009
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A second internal drive is technically best. You just shouldn't record to your system drive is what I understand.
So on my iMac and Macbook I use an external. And the Mac Pro at our studio only has one internal. Most everyone I've ever met uses externals.
Tracking to an external drive doesn't invite any more problems or errors one way or the other. It just generally doesn't have as high of a transfer rate.
I've used external FW800 drives ever since I got my first Macbook. Carried that on with my iMac. Always backed my stuff up onto another drive and so far, I've been really happy and had no issues. Just put an extra hard disk in my iMac so I'll be putting all my audio onto my internal 1TB drive.
