Hard Drive

medicmatt · Post by **medicmatt** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 12:29 pm

Hello and seasons greetings everyone.

I'm looking for a good and affordable external hard drive for my recordings in DP (and possibly other programs including BFD). I'm new to macs, but am using a duo 2 core processor with 2 GHz right now. Do you guys have any suggestions?

msmith92 · Post by **msmith92** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 12:45 pm

if you can afford glyph get them. if not i think the next best solution is ezquest's hard drives. they make a pro audio version that's reliable. i have 2 of them.

digidan · Post by **digidan** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 1:17 pm

These guys make a really good external..http://www.g-technology.com/ I have used them several times for large projects and know of some people using them to stream video into final cut pro as well.

tw_247 · Post by **tw_247** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 1:29 pm

i would also go w/ glyph if possible. lacie is what i am working w/ now, and their 'clearance corner' has great deals.

medicmatt · Post by **medicmatt** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 1:30 pm

What specs are most important in an external hard drive for what I'm going to be using it for?

PS - thank you digidan for the reply and somewhat disturbing comic. I've been there, as I'm sure we all have.

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 2:59 pm

medicmatt wrote:What specs are most important in an external hard drive for what I'm going to be using it for?

PS - thank you digidan for the reply and somewhat disturbing comic. I've been there, as I'm sure we all have.

7200 rpm or faster
8MB or, better, 16MB cache

Firewire: good. eSATA: better.

You might consider balancing drive capacity with seek time. The bigger the drive, the harder it will work. I wouldn't recommend a drive larger than 300GB. Larger drives are okay for storing sample libraries, but there are clear benefits for recording and playback to/from disc with using a smaller drive. You can offload and archive your projects to CD-ROM or DVD-ROM as they are completed, which helps keep your recording drive tidy and performing its best.

I agree- one of the Glyph GT series drives or the G-Tech drives get great marks for durability and performance. Second-level drives would be those from Western Digital and La Cie, with stability and integrity points going in favor of WD in my experience.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 5:20 pm

The only drive I've ever had that actually failed was a Glyph. I opened it up and inside it was a plain old IBM Deskstar (IDE) drive. You're paying for the enclosure with Glyph, because the drive inside is probably the cheapest on the market. (like the Deskstar) Before it failed, I thought Glyph was top-of-the-line. I was very wrong about that. I had paid $450 for a drive that cost about $95 at the time, plus an enclosure and power supply.

Personally, I'd look for a Western Digital Raptor. For many reasons, this is probably the best drive made at this time. The mean time between failure is something like 20 years. It's also the fastest consumer drive out there. The trouble is that it's SATA, and I do not know if they make one as an external drive. If you can find a Raptor in an external drive enclosure, it would be about as good as you can get.

Anybody know of such a thing?

Shooshie

newrigel · Post by **newrigel** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 7:32 pm

RAPTORS RULE!

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 7:39 pm

Shooshie wrote:The only drive I've ever had that actually failed was a Glyph. I opened it up and inside it was a plain old IBM Deskstar (IDE) drive. You're paying for the enclosure with Glyph, because the drive inside is probably the cheapest on the market. (like the Deskstar) Before it failed, I thought Glyph was top-of-the-line. I was very wrong about that. I had paid $450 for a drive that cost about $95 at the time, plus an enclosure and power supply.

Personally, I'd look for a Western Digital Raptor. For many reasons, this is probably the best drive made at this time. The mean time between failure is something like 20 years. It's also the fastest consumer drive out there. The trouble is that it's SATA, and I do not know if they make one as an external drive. If you can find a Raptor in an external drive enclosure, it would be about as good as you can get.

Anybody know of such a thing?

Shooshie

Was yours a GT series drive? Glyph does put out cheaper drives at a premium-- but I didn't pay $450 for my GT's and they are better drives than some of their other ones. I refused to pay Glyph premiums prior, but the GT's are solid.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Fri Dec 15, 2006 10:46 pm

I don't know what it was. I rebuilt it with another drive I had lying around here, so it's now something else. But the enclosure still works.

In fairness to Glyph, IBM made a series of Deskstars around 2001 which all failed in a short time. I bought my Glyph in 2002, and it must have contained one of those faulty Deskstars. If it had been a good drive from IBM, I'm sure it would still be working. Glyph had no way of knowing that IBM's drives were faulty, and it was quite a scandal for a while. Still, when the news broke, you'd think that Glyph could have done a recall and charged it to IBM.

Shooshie

monkey man · Post by **monkey man** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 5:22 am

Good ol' IBM DeathStars.

Upon switching from ATARI to mac in 2001(!), I went through several of these in quick succession without any help from my "store".
It was years later, after I gained internet accessibility that I realised the score.

Glyph should've done that recall; the whole world seemed to know about it.
Except for the monkey, of course.

abe_lincoln78 · Post by **abe_lincoln78** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 8:13 am

Heres the thing about HD size and seek time: A larger HD may have a longer seek time, but you will notice that the increase in that time is not linear with respect to increase in drive size.

Take for instance the full stroke seek time. On a 250 gig western digital drive, it is 21ms on the average. It is also 21ms for the 500 gig drive. You can see there is no difference there. Also, the read and write seek times are identical on the average.

But here is where you can cheat and get significantly faster seek times and maximize your transfer rates: You can shorten the stroke of your giant drive and use the outermost region of the plattens to store your data. This will not only give you an increase in read speed due to the higher rectiliniar velocity of that region, but it will also shorten the distance that the head has to move to retrieve information. This will significantly reduce your seek time if you half or quarter stroke your drive.

The result is a faster drive of larger size, so you can store project files you may not be using on the inner partition and keep your working files on the outer partition. You will be happy with the improved performance. I reccommend doing the same thing to your OS drive as well. Make your partition just big enough for Mac OS, all your applications, and your virtual memory. My OS partition is 20 gigs. That is plenty, since you can expect OSX and your applications to take up about 10 gigs. The remaining 10 will be enough for virtual memory. Then you set up your file system so all of your documents, iTunes music, movies, pictures, etc are in folders on the inner partition and you can put alias folders where the ones OSX set up for you were before. You can even copy over the icons to the folders you created so they look like they would have originally.

HCMarkus · Post by **HCMarkus** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 2:59 pm

Response to MedicMatt, and a Question for Abe:

Response: Raptors are really swell. If you are up to installing an eSATA card in a G5 or MacPro, eSATA is definitely the way to go, especially when using Firewire I/O. OWC has a dual-drive enclosure for $80, which you can load with two drive of your choice. With an iMac, I believe you are unable to add a card, so you need a Firewire or USB2 enclosure. The Glyph enclosures are good in the sense that they use a good Firewire bridge chip, but I am also sure many other far less expensive enclosures use the same chip. Drop a Raptor or two in a quality Firewire case and you will be doing as well as can be hoped. I have not used USB as a drive interface, haiving heard some less-than-positive remarks, but if USB uses a different buss in your Mac than Firewire, it may be advantageous to use it rather than Firewire for your hard drives.

Question: How does one determine which drive partition resides in the outer, faster, portion of the disc platters? I have been a big proponent of partitioning for some time.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 5:18 pm

I second HCMarkus's question: how do you know which partition is on the outside? I need the absolute fastest drive possible for Ivory, the VI piano. It's an incredible VI, but it has a little light that says "Slow Disk," and when that light comes on you can expect some inconsistencies in the playback. Especially sustained notes that cut off too soon (and very obviously). I'd sure like to get that as fast as possible.

Shooshie

Frodo · Post by **Frodo** » Sat Dec 16, 2006 5:37 pm

Some VI software actually suggests to *not* partition, but I don't take that as a global rule of thumb-- just a little confusing from one plugin to the next.

I add my curiosity about inside/outside hd partition reading to the other inquiries...