Driven Fast: Choosing The Right Hard Drive

Hi Alec,

Thanks for getting in touch.

Nectar and Ozone can be quite processor hungry items indeed and with running a number of other things it can quickly cause your systems CPU to max out.

The Maserati plugins are great, the amount of them you load up and use at one time will effect your systems performance however, as with any plug-ins. More RAM would be ideal however on your case it is limited, getting a higher speed hard drive may help your system in terms of reading audio and recording, as we speak about in this article, but may not benefit you so much in terms of CPU help with processing plug-ins.

My main bit of advice would be, if you have applied a plug-in and are happy with what it is doing for that bit of audio, then render that down to a new audio track and make the plugin inactive. That way you still have the plugin within your session to reactivate should you wish to make tweaks but it isn’t using resources when you don’t need it to!

Hope that makes sense, its a great way to help restricted systems when you no longer want to make tweaks to one plug-in in particular.

Thanks

With 16GB ram on your system along with the strength of the SSD I would say you should be fine on installing the plug-ins to your main computer. Pro Tools won’t be too demanding so you should still find it runs efficiently.

Hope this helps.
Thanks for getting in touch.

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the kind words! The thing with Native Instruments such as Kontakt is that they load all the samples for a given instrument into RAM to give to best performance, so as a start while the samples are stored on the USB drive they will still be pulled onto your systems resources. I don’t think getting a FireWire drive in this situation would benefit you too much as that error message generally relates to RAM. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head which could help is that instruments such as Kontakt feature a button which will purge unused samples, but then again if you have a lot of these kind of instruments running that may not make too much difference.

Hope that helps a little!

Hi Trey,

You may find that the internal drive along could be ok for small projects, if you find it isn’t then you are best looking for a SSD portable drive which has enough storage to handle your sessions.

Thanks

Hi Marcelo,

Thank you for getting in touch, The new mac minis are certainly much more powerful than they were but again it can come down to the processor as well as the RAM etc, it may be worth you reading this SOS article here as it should answer all of your questions http://bit.ly/Trqn2I.

Thanks

Hi there,

Hmm, well try NIFTY drive , That should work for your kind of work. Here is the link for that.

http://theniftyminidrive.com

-Baba.

Hi Mikey,

I’m afraid as with the other people who have asked similar questions, I’ll have to admit it is a bit of a grey area. Technically speaking a duel 5400rpm thunderbolt should be able to handle a fair whack of sending and receiving, from past experience, a 100MB/Second transfer rate should handle just over 700 tracks of audio at 24bit/48KHz so in your situation fewer tracks but at a high sample rate should fall even on those statistics. The main factor to consider on top of the read/write speed of the drive is the speed capabilities based on how it is connected to your system, with thunderbolt of course I cannot imagine this would be a problem.

I suppose my bottom line on this is that yes, in my mind technically you should be able to run this kind of setup without any issues, BUT I haven;t ever gone to those depths myself so can’t say for sure that it would work for you.

I know this answer is a bit vague but can only hope it has helped you a little in the mindfield of these queries?

Anything else you would like to ask let us know! 🙂
Admin

Hi Angeli, In terms of compatibility, yes this drive should work without any issues with Pro Tools HD 9, from my experience 5400rpm is better suited to storage and transfer as opposed to running live from it as we discuss in the articles, You are more likely to encounter a jerky transfer in comparison to a 7200 rpm. That being said there is no harm in you trying and see how stable is works with your session.

Let us know how you get on!

Hi Roob,

I believe that the arguments as to whether fusion drives are the cause of many DAW issues is still very much in force so we can understand your point! Well as for processing power, an iMac of that spec should handle a fair amount of work thrown at it. As i’m sure you have read from our article, to run most efficiently, it is best to have your internal drive run the Pro Tools software solely, a 256GB will by far be enough store to run the software, and of course the benefit of flash drives is their fast read speeds so you shouldn’t hit any bumps on that front. The only issue with flash drives is that constant reading and writing can cause their lifespan to decrease quicker, an issue you will not have by using a separate external drive to read and write your audio to :).

The Western Digital hard drive you mention would be a sensible option for handling the audio side of things, providing 1TB of storage is sufficient which i’m sure it would be!

So in roundup, yes! This set up sounds like you could have a nice stable system on your hands for some pretty heavy sessions, should you work on them.

Any questions just ask.
Thanks

Hi Andy,

Well the first thing that should be noted about Thunderbolt is that it is considerably faster than even USB 3.0, so yes in theory you should be absolutely fine in using a drive of this kind to help save on those Macbook USB ports. 1TB will hold a lot of recordings as well, even at high rates and depths. Your Macbook Pro specifications look more than capable of running the Pro Tools software smoothly so I can’t see no reason why this combination wouldn’t give you a strong platform to work from! 🙂

Any questions just ask!
Admin

Hi, As we mention in our article, the idea of using specific hard drives for certain tasks is to reduce the stress on the system doing everything itself. So in answer to your question, size doesn’t play a big picture in the way the software is run, you simply need enough to store and run the program, the speed and size elements come into when you are recording and playing back material which is on a separate drive, leaving the systems main to alone run the program, hope that makes sense.

Any problems just ask.

Thanks