Page 1 of 1
Hard Drive for Audio
Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2017 8:35 am
by karafinman
What is the minimum storage I should get for the HDD for audio. I am going to mostly write instrumental music using the instruments from East West Composer Cloud, including orchestral. Is 1TB a good guess?
Re: Hard Drive for Audio
Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2017 10:24 am
by mojobone
If I didn't need to fly with it, I'd get something like this; big, economical, and quiet, though it does have a spinning disc.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/GDriveG1-4TB
Re: Hard Drive for Audio
Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2017 10:25 am
by andygabrys
you are talking about a sample streaming drive?
The general calculation for mechanical hard drives is:
take the storage that you need for all the samples you will ever store on that drive, and double it (at least).
So say you have 500 GB of EW composer collection samples - double that. You need at least a 1 TB drive.
Keep in mind that if you are doing orchestral mockups and you are streaming an entire orchestra off the one drive, you might run into a bottleneck as mechanical HD aren't that fast.
So you might need 1 drive for the woodwinds, 1 for the brass, 1 for the strings, 1 for the percussion.
OTOH
General calculation for Solid state Drives (SSDs):
you can fill it up about 75% full.
So same situation - 500 GB of Samples.
Size of drive x 75% = 500 GB so the drive should be about 667 GB which means a 1TB drive.
Solid state drives read many times faster than mech HD (at least 5 x in most cases) so you can also maybe get away with one SSD to stream all your samples.
Re: Hard Drive for Audio
Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2017 10:45 am
by hummingbird
I have 3 drives on my PC, a 1T SATA for samples and projects, a 300GB SATA that holds my old files from the last computer; my operating system, which is a 280GB SSD (works ok but wish it was bigger). (I have a couple of small sample libraries on the SSD as I heard they have issues streaming from a different drive). I use Composer Cloud. Just be aware when you start downloading the libraries you're going to use a lot of bandwidth - check your usage with your ISP so you don't go into overage charges. Oh, I also have an external hard drive for backups.
HTH
Re: Hard Drive for Audio
Posted: Sun Jun 25, 2017 2:58 pm
by ttully
Like Hummingbird,
I have 3 drives....
a 1TB SSD for the OS and Protools.
A 1TB regular drive for projects.
and a 2TB drive for samples and libraries.
I stay away from the cloud.... usually too slow.
Also everything is cloned regularly to backup drives...
It is so very very difficult to reinstall everything in case of a catastrophic failure!!!!!!
Tim