How to Choose A Hard Drive For Audio Recording

Choosing the right hard drive for recording audio is of paramount importance. It is often assumed that the internal hard drive originally installed in their computer will be suitable. It is important to dedicate a separate hard drive for your audio recordings and one for your system respectively. When using the system drive for recording massive files, it will bog down the system. I will offer a few pointers for choosing the best hard drive for your recording. This will provide for a lean and mean computer recording system.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Computer
• Digital Audio Workstation

1. What I look for with an external hard drive are two things:
   
   1) It's transfer rate
   2) The hardware protocol
   
   The two most widely used internal hard drives are:
   
   1) IDE
   2) SATA
   
   There are three common types of external hard drives:
   
   1) USB
   2) FW 400 (firewire)
   3) FW 800 (firewire)
2. Most computers provide multiple open slots to accommodate extra hard drives. The drives are generally much cheaper since they do not require an elaborate enclosure specific to the external drives.
   
   I prefer to actually record to a dedicated audio drive that in installed directly in the computer. They tend to be a bit more stable than external drives.
3. External hard drives are pretty common when operating a profession recording studio. Many clients will move them around from studio to studio. It's a very convenient way to transport large files.
   
   I prefer using the FW 800 as they have the fastest transfer rate possible.
   
   I still use FW 400. For recording audio they are pretty standard.
   
   When transferring data from one drive to the next for archival reasons I prefer the FW 800. It has approximately double the transfer speed and can take half as much time to do the job.
4. USB drives are the slowest of all and not generally recommended for recording audio.
   
   In some cases I've seen people actually record directly to an iPod (USB). Perhaps it was a fluke, but it seemed to work without fail.
5. For internal drives I like the Western Digital Caviar. They can be purchased in large capacities and are widely used because of their stability.
   
   For external firewire drives (FW) I tend to gravitate to those designed by OWC called the OWC Mercury. I have used them for many years without fail.

Tips & Warnings

• One thing to note is that the main difference between internal and external hard drives is the external enclosure. The enclosure makes it possible to take a standard drive and place it neatly inside. They also include a power supply, whereas an internal drive would plug directly into the computers power supply.
• The enclosures can also be purchased separately for installing any internal drive you wish to configure into an external hard drive.