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I need to buy an external hard drive for recording audio in Logic and was wondering how much cache is recommended? I see that there are drives on OWC ranging from 8MB to 32MB. I am not planning on having anything too complex (5 to 10 tracks per song). Thanks!!!!!!!

I'm not an expert, but I would think the speed of the drive 7200rpms 10,000 rpms and the size of the drive 500gb, 2 terrabytes, probably has much to do with the cache size. I would further guess and say the smaller the drive and the faster the speed would decrease the need for a large cache size. Of course the seek time would make a difference also. I would just choose the size of drive you want, research other's opinions, Newegg is a good place to see what people say about a particular drive and how much trouble or how good they are. I believe 7,200 rpms or faster is the most often recommended speed for audio. I've never heard anyone say they wished they had a bigger cache size, most complaints I have seen are more about failures of the drives themselves. Of course price is another big factor in my decisions. I have a mixed bag of brands, sizes, of internal drives and one external that came preinstalled with a program, and I couldn't tell you which one was which as far as performance goes, let alone cache size.

ESATA or FireWire, 7200 RPM or better, 500G-1TB; larger drives have slower seek times, more small drives is generally better than fewer big drives. In my understanding, L2 Cache relates to RAM and the MOBO configuration as regards streaming/throughput. If it relates to hard drives at all, it's more about housekeeping/swapfiles. (i.e.: using drive space as virtual RAM)

Thanks for the help! I have an Apogee Duet hooked up to my computer right now. Does the daisy chain sequence matter (i.e. external drive to Duet to iMac OR Duet to external drive to iMac)?

I'm not sure it matters, if I had a preference I would probably pick the apogee into the hard drive, the apogee probably doesn't render near as much bytes of data as a hard drive would, or as often, but I think the buss or in the node hierarchy id process I am sure the hard drive would be given priority anyway. Of course in practice, only change what isn't working or giving you problems,lol!!!

I have an OWC 1TB (7200 RPM) external HD that I plug in to the iMac, and the Duet plugs into the OWC. I think this is the most common setup. Works like a charm so far.

herminga123 wrote:Thanks for the help! I have an Apogee Duet hooked up to my computer right now. Does the daisy chain sequence matter (i.e. external drive to Duet to iMac OR Duet to external drive to iMac)?

I tend not to mix interfaces and hard drives on the same FireWire bus, but only because my interface manufacturer (Tascam/Frontier Designs) recommends against it. If I did, I'd probably put the drives closest to the computer and the interface at the far end.