HD for my PC

[Kamin]

i was looking into gettin a new hard drive for my comp, from what you all said in one of the previous topics, the bigger the better, so i decided to go with a 200 gb HD (hopefully, that will be big enough to store all of my music :) ). the quetsion now is, do i go with the internal, or the external firewire drive...i cant pick which, so maybe you guys would have some suggestions.

[Tigerfolly]

i was looking into gettin a new hard drive for my comp, from what you all said in one of the previous topics, the bigger the better, so i decided to go with a 200 gb HD (hopefully, that will be big enough to store all of my music :) ). the quetsion now is, do i go with the internal, or the external firewire drive...i cant pick which, so maybe you guys would have some suggestions.

The internal is going to be faster and more efficient, but the external allows you to connect to multiple machines if you work in more than one studio. If you don't have more than one computer, and don't have any friends with computers and/or studios that you'll be able to interface with, then the external is kind of a waste of money.

I personally would get a Firewire or USB 2.0 drive for my setup, because I work on six different computers right now (2 at the studio, 3 at home, and my laptop), and I just rely on my networks to share data between them all (wireless networks are wonderful, wonderful things). But my situation isn't everyone's situation. Firewire and USB 2.0 are pretty similar in transfer speeds, Firewire is up to 400mb/sec, and USB 2.0 is up to 480mb/sec, so either will do the job. You can buy USB 2.0 enclosures for a standard IDE hard drive, and it will work just fine.. you just have to make sure you have USB 2.0 ports on your computer. If not, you can buy a USB 2.0 card for fairly cheap (I've got a USB 2.0 DVDRW drive in an external enclosure, and the PCMCIA card for my laptop was $40, and the internal USB 2.0 PCI for my desktop was like $20). Plus, you can get some pretty nifty enclosures.. a buddy of mine has a clear lexan one with neon lights inside.. Riced out baby.

Another option that's a "best of both worlds" type of thing is a removable hard drive bay. You get one of these, and put a standard hard drive into it, and it's still portable for dragging to other studios, while still being based on an inexpensive IDE hard drive.

But again, all of that is moot if this stuff is only going to be on one computer.

[Digilog]

I was under the impression that a firewire hard drive that is NOT powered by the firewire cable, but by a power adapter will generally out perform any internal hard drive.

[Spacehog]

How the drive's powered isn't that relevant. Firewire is restricted to its 400Mb/s (that's Mega BITS/sec) whereas ATA133 has a maximum transfer rate of 133MB/s (that's Mega BYTES/sec) which is roughly 1000Mb/s. No hard drive available will put anything like this throughput out anyway, so there's really not a lot in it.

For real performance, get 2 identical drives, stripe them on a RAID controller (I have 2 120Gb drives striped like this as I have RAID built into my motherboard), but then remember to back up regularly cos if one drive fails all the data is lost (I have a 160Gb drive that I use for backups, and a DVD writer for finished projects).

Martin

[Tigerfolly]

I was under the impression that a firewire hard drive that is NOT powered by the firewire cable, but by a power adapter will generally out perform any internal hard drive.

As Spacehog has already answered the meat and potatoes of this question, I'll just interject one more little thing:

Like external Firewire drive, external drives in a USB 2.0 enclosure are also powered by a power adapter and not through USB bus power.. at least, every single one I've seen has been. I don't know the limitations of USB bus power, but it sure seems like a bad idea to run a hard drive off of bus power.

[Digilog]

Thanks for the replys guys, makes a lot of sense. I've only seen a couple of firewire hard drives that were powered by the cable and not an adapter. ProTools didn't take to kindly to them :lol: