Recording on External HDD: best practice

Chewie5150

Chewie5150

Fractal Fanatic
I have a 2018 mac mini running Cubase Pro 11. I'm looking at getting a new external drive for system backups but also thought about partitioning for my recording projects. From what I've read it's been suggested better to record to external drives to ease the processing load off the internal drive where the OS is stored. Is this really the case esp if my Mac mini has an internal SSD??

So....this leads me to the question as to what drive will do the job? does it need to be an SSD which are ridiculously expensive? or get a large drive that is at least USB 3.0 or higher...usb-c would be the connection I'd prefer.

A secondary question/consideration is I'm thinking about getting Superior Drummer 3. Wondering if a spinning disk at USB 3.0 or higher would also cut the mustard.

Thanks in advance
 
For a sample library like ones for use with SD3, absolutely positively get an SSD. For recording audio, it doesnt matter whether it’s internal or external for the processing load. Using external makes it easier to manage your projects though, for example when backing up or transferring to another computer.

The only case where it makes any sense to use a magnetic drive these days is for a large capacity backup volume.
 
I don't have a Mac but have done some recording on one but would recommend SSD as well. As far as recording to an external drive, I don't really have any experience doing it that way. My understanding is that regardless of the speed of the drive, the speed of writing to it is going to be limited by the speed the information can get from the computer to the drive via USB, Thunderbolt or Firewire. I suppose it would depend upon how many tracks you're recording at one time. I personally use an external SSD for storing files and plugins and use the internal SSD drive for recording.
 
JoKeR III said:
I don't have a Mac but have done some recording on one but would recommend SSD as well. As far as recording to an external drive, I don't really have any experience doing it that way. My understanding is that regardless of the speed of the drive, the speed of writing to it is going to be limited by the speed the information can get from the computer to the drive via USB, Thunderbolt or Firewire. I suppose it would depend upon how many tracks you're recording at one time. I personally use an external SSD for storing files and plugins and use the internal SSD drive for recording.
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My instinct was to do it this way. Just do the actual recording on my machine's internal drive. backup to an external. Basically have one project at a time that I'm recording and once finished backup to external. I know SSD is the fastest/best but for my purpose I think i'd be fine with a traditional drive. Its a rabbit hole with all the different HDD's as they have different speeds and as you mention it will ultimately come down to the connection method limiting the transfer speed.
 
Storage is a lot more complex than most people think it is. One external drive in an enclosure is relatively simple...USB-C or Thunderbolt with an SSD is going to be good. And apart from the general chip shortage, a couple TB isn't all that expensive and will be "fast enough". If you can find an enclosure that does it and have the budget, I'd go ahead and get one that does RAID 1 and just pay twice as much for storage to give you some time to recover from a single disk failure.

But, IMO, the "best practice" for that would be in a year or two to proactively replace one of the drives (ideally by adding a new one and then potentially removing one of the old ones after the rebuild) just so they're at different wear levels. But, I'm not aware of a simple enclosure that allows that.

Bare minimum IMHO for modern Mac Minis is OS on internal, an external SSD for live, and another external SSD for backups on a schedule (or simplify it and use some cloud backup thing....dropbox, rsync.net, backblaze, etc. all work).

For the more complex side....

I don't believe in hard drives anymore except for long term "write once, read maybe" archive storage.

My computers (studio desktop, work desktop, and work laptop) boot of either NVMe drives or a RAID 10 of small SSDs. Everything uses a storage server over 10GbE for bulk storage, which is a bigger RAID 10 of SSDs. The RAIDs are actually all ZFS stripe of mirrors, but it's basically RAID 10 with RAM caching, virtual datasets, and data integrity features. That gets backed up off-site to something else that boils down to another RAID 10 of HDDs for disaster recovery.

No, it wasn't anything like cheap. But, I'm really happy with it.

I'm also a ridiculous computer dork and found it fun. So, there is that.
 
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