Best external hard drive to store samples?

Mike Jasper · 28th January 2006

I know. There have been similar threads, but not lately, and it's a New Year. Furthermore, the holidays aren't really over until after the Superbowl, so let's keep it festive in here.

Back to the thread...

What's the deal with external hard drives? I run my system and apps on one Seagate 160GB drive (ST3160023A) and record my sessions onto yet another Seagate 160GB drive (same model). So my samples for soft synths -- BFD, Personal Orchestra, Kontakt, B4 etc. -- need to be stored on an external drive.

The drive I was using sucked equestrian wazoo, but I recently bought a honkin' 500GB number from Other World Computing. Will Firewire 800 be a help in this case? Is the seek/access time also crucial? We don't even talk about anything other than 7200 rpm in a hard drive, do we?

The exact hard drive I bought can be seen here:

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 800 RAID Dual Drive

According to the sales guy who talked to a techie he knows who works with his uncle in the back of the store, the seek is 5.6ms on this, which sounds too good to be true. But the two drives used are Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 and have seek times of 8.5ms -- which is pretty good. Maybe RAIDed out it is a bit better. And at $360 seems also too good to be true (I don't work for OWC, but I have filled out an application).

The downside? Kind of bulky compared to the slim 500GB hard drives LaCie makes and probably noisy compared to my internal Seagates. But since the hard drive will be turned off during live recording, that shouldn't be a factor.

So... what external hard drive would you get to run samples in January, 2006?

Jasper

Mike Jasper · 30th January 2006

No opinions, huh?

I'll let you guys know how the new hard drive works out for me. Frankly, I'm only having trouble with BFD and Personal Orchestra -- I only get about two or three drums (or two or three orchestra instruments) before it's overloaded.

But everything else has been working fine, and that's on a no-name, Firewire 400 external drive.

Jasper

auralsex? · 30th January 2006

We use a Studio Network Solutions X4 iscsi san at the studio I work at for soft synths and sessions on two partitions. Speed and Security of data or no problem but at a price near 7500 for 1 Tb it's out of range for most people. Also full track count in PT at up to 192 Khz on one cat 6 cable.

Mike Jasper · 30th January 2006

Wow. That's badass. I guess SCSI still is the fastest protocol, isn't it.

28th January 2006	#1
Mike Jasper Lives for gear Joined: Nov 2002 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 1,729 Thread Starter	Best external hard drive to store samples? I know. There have been similar threads, but not lately, and it's a New Year. Furthermore, the holidays aren't really over until after the Superbowl, so let's keep it festive in here. Back to the thread... What's the deal with external hard drives? I run my system and apps on one Seagate 160GB drive (ST3160023A) and record my sessions onto yet another Seagate 160GB drive (same model). So my samples for soft synths -- BFD, Personal Orchestra, Kontakt, B4 etc. -- need to be stored on an external drive. The drive I was using sucked equestrian wazoo, but I recently bought a honkin' 500GB number from Other World Computing. Will Firewire 800 be a help in this case? Is the seek/access time also crucial? We don't even talk about anything other than 7200 rpm in a hard drive, do we? The exact hard drive I bought can be seen here: OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 800 RAID Dual Drive According to the sales guy who talked to a techie he knows who works with his uncle in the back of the store, the seek is 5.6ms on this, which sounds too good to be true. But the two drives used are Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 and have seek times of 8.5ms -- which is pretty good. Maybe RAIDed out it is a bit better. And at $360 seems also too good to be true (I don't work for OWC, but I have filled out an application). The downside? Kind of bulky compared to the slim 500GB hard drives LaCie makes and probably noisy compared to my internal Seagates. But since the hard drive will be turned off during live recording, that shouldn't be a factor. So... what external hard drive would you get to run samples in January, 2006? Jasper

30th January 2006	#3
auralsex? Gear interested Joined: Dec 2005 Location: Saint Louis Posts: 8	We use iscsi at the studio I work at We use a Studio Network Solutions X4 iscsi san at the studio I work at for soft synths and sessions on two partitions. Speed and Security of data or no problem but at a price near 7500 for 1 Tb it's out of range for most people. Also full track count in PT at up to 192 Khz on one cat 6 cable.

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