External Hard Drive or No

[lamarjones]

on my macbook pro using a digi 002, the only issues I ever encountered was when trying to use my internal drive as a recording volume, which is specifically states you should not be doing. NEVER an issue with the 002 running into the FW port of my drive running into the macbooks FW port.

 

[DocBop]

i am still new at this recording deal, but here goes what i know.

It is best to use an external drive that is specially made for recording because those drives allocate space big enough for the file, instead of splitting it into many different parts like the hard drive of a computer will do. basically, the special hard drives make space to put all of the file in one spot, while computer drives scatters the information and puts peices of the file wherever it can find space. this does effect the recording quality (slightly, but it is noticeable)

Just curious, but what software are you using? i am lucky enough to be using ProTools 7 LE with a pretty nice digitech mixing board.

What you are talking about is increasing the sector size the hard drive uses and that is very specialized. My only experience with it was for film and animation studios who are reading/writing HUGE files. Large sectors only make for more efficient use of the drive space, they aren't going to effect the quality of anything it just storage. As for fragmentation there are a lot of ways to approach keeping fragmentation down, and some fragmentation can work in your favor if you know how disk drives work. I would say if you dedicate a hard drive or even partition to storing your project(s) you will be fine.

 

[Dave Martin]

Dave--just curious--do you have some sort RAID setup? And what sort of backup strategy do you use with a 1TB hard drive rig? Also, are there any partitioning/swap ideas you can share for ensuring quickest read times on big audio drives?

I'm not running a RAID setup - just a bunch of Firewire drives. My backup strategy, such as it is, is that whenever we take a break in the session (lunch or dinner) and again at the end of the day, the active project gets dragged from the recording drive to a backup drive.
When we reach some sort of stopping point (for instance, all the tracking done, all the overdubs done, or whatever), the updated project folder is dragged over to the storage drive as well. (so there are three versions of an active or unfinished project on my drives at a given time; we're working on one, the other is less than three hours behind it, and the third might be as much as a week behind that. Once the project is finished and I'm paid, I burn two copies on DVD's (sometimes this will take 10-15 dvd's). One is stored at the studio and the other is stored offsite. for a lot of my work, a third copy of the finished project lives on the archive drives - currently there are two of these (one online the other offline) that are 750 Gig drives.

I don't really worry about read and swap times; as I mentioned earlier, 60 track sessions play back just fine from one Firewire 800 drive. But I also tend to consolidate files pretty regularly, and the recording drive (a 150 gig drive) doesn't get too full. On the rare occasions that things have gotten slow, I'll drag everyhing off of the recording drive onto another drive, erase the recording drive, then drag it all back on. This seems to fix any isssues with fragmented files...