Hard Drive Full, Looking for External Drive Recommendations.

[Andy Davidson]

Hi All,

Nothing eats up hard-drive space more than sample libraries and I’m about to run out! I’m using a laptop and there’s no space to fit an additional drive in it either.

So I’m looking at moving a lot of my libraries and future ones too (mainly PianoBook and NI Komplete 12), to an external hard-drive.

I’m not too worried about portability, as it’ll be in the home studio all of the time, so I’m looking at:

• USB 3.x for speed

• 3.5 inch HHD as i’m not worried about the physical size and this is a better TB/££ ratio than the 2.5 inch ones.

• Looking at 5TB plus. Storage size is key here! This laptop has an SSD 256 GB drive and it’s close to full! So I’ll compromise speed to get greater storage capacity.

It’s a minefield looking out there, wondering if anyone has any recommendations or any to avoid at all costs!

Can’t wait to just get back to playing sample libraries rather than juggling them to fit into what little space is left on this laptop!

Thanks very much for all advice and feedback, much appreciated.

Cheers,

Andy.

[christianhenson]

I would recommend a 4TB sandisk SSD I use a blackmagic SSD dock on my main rig so I can hot swap out my main drives insert into one of those cheap inatek enclosures and take on the road. I keep my big orch libraries on one disk and my home made samples on a second drive.

[Andy Davidson]

Thanks so much for this Christian, that’s very good to know, I hadn’t even thought of external SSD, thanks for the info. Off to Google those now right now. I took delivery NI Komplete 12 this week so I’ll be a new starter with Kontakt, but can’t wait to get my teeth into it! I’ve been using Ableton’s samplers, Halion and TAL-Sampler, but it’s great to finally get to Kontakt! Looking forward to contributing here. Thanks again.

[synthesizerwriter]

SSD is about 4x the price of spinning disks, so that might be something to consider. Also, don’t forget backups – especially for ‘home-made samples’ and other files that you have created. One approach is SSD for fast everyday access, copied onto a spinning disk for backups, and you need to decide about the backup interval (continuous, daily, weekly…), incremental or full backups, retention policies (’round-robins’!), as well as proper backup scheduling software utilities.

Every disk I have ever owned has failed eventually (always suddenly, never with any warning). Recovery of data from them has been… disappointing…

This stuff can’t be repeated enough: Do you have a backup of your work? Is it somewhere well away from a flood, fire or other event/person that kills your main computer? Do you have a disaster recovery plan?

[Andy Davidson]

Thanks synthesizerwriter, this is great info. I’ve since bought an external USB3.1 2TB SSD and it’s got me out of the log jam of not enough space! As you mentioned, the £/TB ratio is lower than spinning discs, so I’m now also thinking of a 5TB+ external HDD for greater storage on non-live libraries and a sample archive. For free libraries I’ve downloaded, I’m also keekping an inventory of them and where I got them from! I’m also looking at cloud based storage too, my current cloud storage doesn’t allow folders, it has to be zipped! And no files bigger than 10gb so it’s not practical at all! Too many samples, too little time and too little space! Thanks again, much appreciated.

Cheers,

Andy.

[ferqw]

Hey Andy, thank you so much for putting this subject forward! Some very cool insights on here as well. I’ve been looking for a good and affordable external hard drive for a while, but I have not found one yet. I’m quite cautious because I nearly lost all of my data because of a poor-quality device. Luckily, a good friend of mine works in a company specializing in quick and reliable data recovery, and he was able to solve the problem in no time. Therefore, before pulling the trigger, make sure you do your research! Good luck.

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