Using an External Hard Drive vs. a separate computer for music producing

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Using an External Hard Drive vs. a separate computer for music producing

Hi all. I have a dilemma. I'm currently using logic express to make my music and its installed on my 13 inch macbook pro that I bought last year. Granted, it works fine, however I am looking to upgrade to Logic Studio soon as well as purchase Spectrasonic's Omisphere, which for those who don't know is about 50 gb of sounds. That on top of the 50 gb that come with Logic Studio means about 100 gb of software which I frankly don't have the room for on my macbook pro. I've been looking at buying a new mac mini, 2.3 ghz i5 with 8gb of RAM and a 500 gb Hard Drive, solely dedicated to making music. However, my friends tell me I should just buy an external hard drive and install Logic, as well as the software, on the hard drive since it will be far less expensive than buying a new computer. However, I don't know how I feel about installing software on an external hard drive. So my question is, given what I am trying to do, what is my best option? Are there issues with using an external hard drive for this sort of work that would make buying a seperate mac mini more practical, or vice versa?

Posted on Aug 14, 2011 1:57 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 14, 2011 9:41 AM in response to jbahmani

If you want to do this in a cost-effective way, you should delete some files you don't need from your macbook pro to make room for logic pro. Even though Logic Pro has around 50 GB of stuff, most of it comes from the Jam Packs, which I'm guessing you won't really need to use...So make room for Logic Pro on your laptop and install it there...then use the external hard drive to store and record your music to.

If you're going to get a mac mini with that type of spec, you might as well buy a new macbook pro with the same specs and better.

Option #3, you can always upgrade your internal hard drive...there are plenty of sites on the net that shows tutorials and offers hard drives that have plenty of storage, faster speed, and you won't even need to purchase an external if you upgrade to at least a 1 TB, 7200 rpm hard drive.

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