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Old 06-24-2020, 12:33 PM
ejs ejs is offline
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Default Re: Requirements on Externall HDs for audio/samples/Libs

Quote:
Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm View Post
I would look and try to see what exact drive is installed in any external drive, especially if somebody has reviewed it. But start with if they don't clearly spec 7,200 RPM then definitely avoid it, just so slow they are painful. I have long used G-Technology drives, and for example I have several 1TB G-Drive eV RaW drives (and many older drives), but made sure to get the 7,200 rpm version, then available only in 1Tb size.

I just don't have anything intelligent to say about the latest high density external drives. I don't use them. I wish there were better technical reviews and long term tests done with them but they are such cheap commodities nowadays. And I would like to see stats on SMR vs CMR drive reliability, and even knowing the WD Black uses SMR in some higher density drives I've not heard of that causing reliability issues... but be paranoid, use a couple of different model drives.
Thanks again, Darryl. Man this is quite the rabbit hole I didn’t really want to go down. So, I like Time Machine and want to keep that going. From what I can tell The G-Drives come with the HGST Ultrastar drive inside. I just purchased a Mercury Elite Pro enclosure that has the USB 3 and Firewire connections which will allow daisy chaining my old firewire drives but connect to the Mac mini at the faster speed via USB C. Inside that I bought the 6TB WD Black 3.5” 7200 Rpm. I’ll continue my Time Machine backups with this drive.


Quote:
Sure, but few units including the U32 Shadow 4TB. Which is maybe why Bombich recommends them? But this is just outside current sweetspots so give it a little time. Most folks today that wanted a lot of external SSD are just going to use multiple drives or for more demanding work stick multiple M.2 drives in an external Thunderbolt chassis... that can be compelling for high end used today, but cooling fans and power supplies make it less compelling with a MacBook Pro. Another option is to take a SSD Sata drive and put in your own enclosure, but I like the compact little T5 and similar units from other vendors, many of those vendors have 4TB 2.5" SATA drives today.. just a matter of time until they end up in a USB version. I expect the reasons there is all market demand and cost, not technology.
I also bought the x5 to use as a bootable clone back up. It’s price and capacity and that Bombich recommended the Shadow made it a hard decision. I also don’t like the look/design as much as the Shadow but you seem to have a thorough understanding of these technologies so I value your recommendation. Thank you

Quote:
Keep you session on the internal SSD not in a dropbox folder. If you put the actual session you run in a Dropbox folder that is likely to completely mess you up. You don't want Dropbox trying to copy stuff while Pro Tools is writing it to disk. When you want to make an archive of your sessions, tar or zip up the session folder and give it a name you can keep track of and copy that tar or zip file to an external drive and also drag and drop onto a cloud service (like into your Dropbox folder). In my case I have a script that does this and uses a utility that uses a simple Google Cloud API to copy stuff there. Check that stuff really gets what you expect and can download and use (e.g. say check it shows up correctly using the Dropbox web UI and download that to a different location, ideally on a different computer, untar/unzip and test run the session).




I think you are on the right track. I would probably grab the X5 and use your current HDDs, or maybe buy a cheap HDD and start doing clones and archive backups... and see how it goes and then decide what else to purchase. If you are doing this well you will soon end up with a decent number of HDD and SSDs stored away safe, nicely labeled, etc. It's so worrying to see folks that don't back up stuff and lose theirs or other's work... and as Dave says, it will happen.

And a nice thing about the X5 with APFS is you may have enough space on a 2TB one to throw a APFS test container on there and test out your future OS upgrades without any risk to your internal drive setup. That's exactly what I'm doing with an X5 now.
Hopefully this is the last piece of technology research I need to do to get my new system up and running smoothly. I really want to get back to trying to make music again. Thanks for all the help
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