Recording onto external hard drive

When you create a new project, you're prompted to name it and select a location for it. Make sure it' saved to the external drive, that's all you have to do.

You can also copy existing files to your new drive in the finder and keep working on them.

When you set up your drive make sure you partition it... some for time machine and some for your project files.

Why record to your external drive?

I wouldn't partition any drive for audio recording.....

But I think your plan is a little suspect.....

You are backing up your system drive but not your audio files?

The typical recommendation is to stream audio to a separate drive...and leave the apps and system to work on the internal...

if using a notebook with a 5400 rpm internal there may be some benefit to streaming to a faster drive...especially if instruments are streaming instead of being ram based...but you should be able to get reasonable track counts using the internal regardless.

The other factor is that an internal on a Macbook may also be somewhat small by todays standards...so the chance of filling it with audio and other things is another consideration....



But if you have only one drive for back-up and your internal. I would recommend you don't stream audio to the external and use the drive for back-up.

Or get another drive for audio streaming....and back up both....

Regardless nothing is backed-up unless it's backed-up at least twice.

If you are new to recording then there is no need what so ever to record to a faster external drive. Your MBP is more than capable of handling the entry level home/hobby recordists needs. The ONLY reason you would make a move to record audio to an external drive was if you actually began to experience dropped audio or pops/clicks etc while actually recording. These are the kinds of things that would lead you to suspect your internal HD was struggling.

An external drive is great for archiving your finished projects as they can be huge in size. Other than that, keep it simple until you actually run into a problem.

I'm using my MacBook Pro's ExpressCard/34 slot to connect to my external hard drive.

Does storing large audio files externally offer more internal hard drive space thus freeing up processing speed?

Or are external hard drives just a faster format?

monasmee wrote:
Does storing large audio files externally offer more internal hard drive space

yes

thus freeing up processing speed?

no

Or are external hard drives just a faster format?

higher bandwidth, it can move more data at the same time

Thanks HangTime, by "higher bandwidth" do you mean the External HD RPM?

Additionally, any article links that explain this thread in greater detail would certainly be appreciated.

monasmee wrote:
by "higher bandwidth" do you mean the External HD RPM?

that's simplifying it, but yes, the speed of the drive, and the bus (though i missed that you're using an expressCard, i've only used FireWire, so i don't know off hand what kinds of gains you may or may not get with the card)