How much hard drive space do I need for DAW projects/files?

S

Steveche

Member
So I have 45gb left in my current SSD, and I have a 1TB external hard disk (mostly for movies, music and backup). The Samsung 850 EVO SSDs were on sale on boxing day, so I bought them, 250GB ($89.99) and 500GB ($179.99), but I have to decide which to keep. Mainly wanted to purchase one for ProTools projects (and whatever else when I run out of space on my current SSD), but I've never had a DAW before so I don't know how much space audio projects take up. I literally just got ProTools and haven't really used it yet (been using my friend's DAW until now).

What do you guys think? 250GB will be plenty? I like the idea of 500GB, but that extra $100 may just sit there unused?
 
Steveche said:
So I have 45gb left in my current SSD, and I have a 1TB external hard disk (mostly for movies, music and backup). The Samsung 850 EVO SSDs were on sale on boxing day, so I bought them, 250GB ($89.99) and 500GB ($179.99), but I have to decide which to keep. Mainly wanted to purchase one for ProTools projects (and whatever else when I run out of space on my current SSD), but I've never had a DAW before so I don't know how much space audio projects take up. I literally just got ProTools and haven't really used it yet (been using my friend's DAW until now).

What do you guys think? 250GB will be plenty? I like the idea of 500GB, but that extra $100 may just sit there unused?
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i have a 250g SSD drive and use that for the "C" drive, the one w/ the operating system on
thats where the most speed should be course if i had the bucks i use SSD on all drives but for DAW projects i wouldn't use less
than a 1TB drive so that lets out the SSD for any of the other drives

IMO buy the 250g SSD for the main and go for a 2TB 7200rpm SATA for the project storage, and another 2TB SATA for sample libraries
etc and while you're at it another 2TB for misc file storage and redundant storage

main thing is the RAM i installed 64g and haven't regretted the expense
 
Chris@AxeFxTutorials said:
How much recording will you do?
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Not a crazy amount. Up next will be my band's 5 song EP. Other than that, my own covers / personal guitar projects which should be fairly simple.

Guitarmandan said:
i have a 250g SSD drive and use that for the "C" drive, the one w/ the operating system on
thats where the most speed should be course if i had the bucks i use SSD on all drives but for DAW projects i wouldn't use less
than a 1TB drive so that lets out the SSD for any of the other drives

IMO buy the 250g SSD for the main and go for a 2TB 7200rpm SATA for the project storage, and another 2TB SATA for sample libraries
etc and while you're at it another 2TB for misc file storage and redundant storage

main thing is the RAM i installed 64g and haven't regretted the expense
Click to expand...

I see. So maybe keep the 250GB SSD and use the extra money on a 2TB HDD for now? All the extra is not needed right now. I assume with that 64GB, it's a mac? Funny thing is, also on boxing day, I bought 8GB of RAM to upgrade my current 8GB to 16GB of RAM. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
 
Solarfire said:
Depends on your recording ambitions, sample rate, bandwith, nummber of tracks and so on...
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I'm not quite sure at this point since I'm just starting off with my own DAW. But I don't think my needs are anything overly complicated for now. It's a little home studio for my personal stuff and my band's stuff, nothing more really. Not really any "professional" studio type use.
 
Steveche said:
I'm not quite sure at this point since I'm just starting off with my own DAW. But I don't think my needs are anything overly complicated for now. It's a little home studio for my personal stuff and my band's stuff, nothing more really. Not really any "professional" studio type use.
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In that case, I would make sure my OS drive is SSD => 250GB (personal preference for SSD's, Samsung 850 Pro with RAPID mode enabled), => 8GB RAM better 16GB (get the fastest you can afford), for data drive 1-2TB HDD types should be sufficient, I personally prefer the WD black or red types...
 
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Steveche said:
Not a crazy amount. Up next will be my band's 5 song EP. Other than that, my own covers / personal guitar projects which should be fairly simple.



I see. So maybe keep the 250GB SSD and use the extra money on a 2TB HDD for now? All the extra is not needed right now. I assume with that 64GB, it's a mac? Funny thing is, also on boxing day, I bought 8GB of RAM to upgrade my current 8GB to 16GB of RAM. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Click to expand...

yes the 64g is a bit much but there was 8 slots and i filled them no Mac a PC i built it myself w/ carefully chosen components
i run the same Win 7 16 g ram is fine 2TB is better investment like Solar Fire said sample rate, track count etc figures in but 2TB drives
are cheap enuff
 
How about some rough ballpark figures... Using Axe's specs as point of reference, 48kHz 24 bit audio in stereo will cost you a bit over 17 MB per minute uncompressed (PCM data or .wav file). Assuming an average mix of say 8 tracks (drums, bass, 2 guitars, vocals, keys, and a couple extra for backing vocals or double tracking) That will run you about 136 MB per minute. Figure an average song length of 5 minutes, that's 680 MB total. Add in a bounced final track and a bit of overhead for project waveform and daw specific data and you're at about 700 MB per song. At this rate, a 1 TB HDD or SSD would give you room for well over 1000 projects. Granted, many project tracks might be mono and not stereo and each track often does not run the entire length of the song, so the actual project size can often be much less. It should at least give you a rough idea to work with. It's always better to over-estimate storage needs anyway.
 
I have a tiny 128GB SSD that I use for my OS and most installed programs, but I have my DAW (Reaper) save everything to a 2 TB mechanical hard drive.

I haven't checked in a while, but I think my DAW projects folder take up about 30 GB right now. And a bunch of that is just riff ideas and song fragments and not fully arranged songs.

Once you start figuring in stuff like VST libraries and so on (which can take 10s of GBs), I could eat up that 128GB in a heartbeat if I saved everything to it. So for me, it's just not feasible to use the SSD for recording stuff when the OS and other programs I have installed already take up an enormous portion of that.

If the drive is just going to be used for recording projects and nothing else, the 250 GB one might do. But if you're going to install a bunch of sample libraries or maybe use the drive for other things, I'd opt for the 500 GB one. As Mr. Fender said above me: "It's always better to over-estimate storage needs anyway".
 
I have 3 internal drives in my main DAW workstation.

OS on one and the other two for audio. The audio drives are 1TB each.

I also have a 2TB external drive for backups and schedule backups once a week.
 
I record a live show once a week. 16 tracks at around 1.5 hours is around 6g at 24bit and 48k. Having a backup(s), as barhrecords noted, is essential. When a drive goes bad, and they do, your stuff is most likely gone and you will be sorry. Invest in back up drives and archive older stuff.
 
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