Best hard drive for recording to?

[LSNY]

OK...what about an external drive to use with a Laptop? I need a new, larger one. Any suggestions?

[Emcha_audio]

recording on an external drive is usually not recommended. Even less for a USB drive.

So if you have a firewwire port on your laptop I'd go with this

G-Technology G-DRIVE 1TB 3.5IN External Hard Drive USB 2.0 eSATA Firewire 800

Or

Western Digital Mybook Studio Edition II 2TB 2000GB Firewire 400/800 eSATA USB2.0

The WD is more expensive has double the capacity. Although you'd have to find a way to disable the raid 0 if possible.

There's also

LaCie D2 Quadra Interface V2.1 1TB 7200RPM External Hard Drive USB 2.0 Firewire 400/800 eSATA with Lacie going over 1 tb will get your external drives that are in fact multiple HD in a raid config.

[The Weed]

External drives are fine, eSATA would be best if you can get an eSATA ExpressCard for your laptop. While Avid did, and still does recommend firewire drives with the appropriate chipsets for the controller and enclosure, they only recommend them for 8x and below for Windows XP and Vista. Starting with Pro Tools 8.0.4 and 9, but only for Windows 7, Avid is recommending USB externals.

The consensus pick for hard drives on the forum right now are 7,200 RPM Western Digital Caviar BLACK drives with a 64 mb cache. One of these in an approved enclosure should be fine. The first question though, especially if it's a Windows laptop, is whether or not said laptop is compatible with Pro Tools.

Cheers,

[Hotcrazyfruit]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

recording on an external drive is usually not recommended. Even less for a USB drive.

External drives are perfectly fine to use. USB is also fine to use on windows 7 with protools 9, although you will get better performance with fire wire 800 or further more e-Sata.

Nick

EDIT: I noticed everything i said, was said above me. My bad

[The Weed]

More coffee, Nick.



Cheers,

[Raoul23]

What about the WD caviar green much different from the black coz they are about half the cost of the black

[The Weed]

NOT GREEN. They have a power saving feature, which you don't want to have happen when recording.

Cheers,

[Raoul23]

I've just had the worst weekend happen pc failed to boot some windows error, then rom drive would read DVDs etc etc

Ok getting to point I think my raptor has just died, took my pc to the guy who built it for me and we are looking at a new drive. I no nothing about technical side but he's quite clued up. So we start looking at hard drives and they are doing a special on the WD green 1 TB the weed has said you don't to use these so I told my friend. He then got up the spec sheet of the green and the drive I'm using at the mo (WD caviar 150 gig quite old) and the green shows a mega improvement the only thing is is that it's 5400 rpm not 7200 rpm and the weed said that it has some power issue thing. Which I told my friend and he said all hard drives turn off when not being used it's a windows thing which u can change. Then he started talking about platters of hard drives etc and it totally lost me. He also explained to me that WD drives are caviar black when they come out then they bring out a new modal which becomes black so the old black becomes the blue

Could any chime in on this I'm so confussed why does it have to be 7200rpm when the green which is 5400 rpm would kick my old 7200 drive in the butt

[Darryl Ramm]

I don't know what metrics you are judging "performance" by but 5400 rpm is 5400 rpm and nothing will reduce the write latency time to approach that of a 7200 rpm drive.

You do not want a WD green drive for reasons others have mentioned. If you have friends/"experts" telling you otherwise you need to ignore that advice. You can search here for past explanations. But it's not interesting to drag this up again--from the point the green drive is just not recommended and for good reason. If you want to get stuff done reliably go buy a black.

Darryl

[The Weed]

A WD Caviar BLACK 64 mb cache 7,200 RPM drive to be precise.

If your "expert" doesn't agree, get a new "expert".

Cheers,