I want to talk about external hard drives and how they can be extremely advantageous to those of you who are working in the studio with audio whether you're a producer a mix engineer a sound designer anything that you do that has a demanding da W you want to have external hard drives in your setup they're going to make your workflow a lot smoother and more efficient they will make your DAW have much better performance they're gonna minimize recording latency and they're going to give you a solid backup that you can rely on in case something goes wrong with one of your drives so let me tell you a little bit about my own personal setup with my external hard drives in the studio.
I have two identical two terabyte drives that are clones of each other in terms of the information on them I have all of my session files all of my sample libraries all that stuff mixing sessions production sessions they are stored on the external so if anything went wrong with the internal drive of my computer the only thing on there is the software it self so that and the plugins which I have a backup for that I'll tell you about that in just a second but I want that to rely on just running the OS keeping the DAW going smoothly I don't want to fill that up with a lot of files and make that one really slow and bogged down so if you've got a backup like this or a clone of your main drive with all your data on it if one of those drives fails I'm immediately able to work and pick up right where I left off no matter what so while the other one I'm getting that replaced or I'm getting it fixed I have all the data on another drive to where I'm not stuck not working so the third external drive I have is a one terabyte USB drive and it's not particularly fast or high-performance like these others are but it is just used for a time machine back up or a complete machine back up of my system computer so if something happened with that drive I have a copy that I could at least back up to my laptop and have the setup with all my software all my plugins saved to this and I back this up daily now as far as connectivity I do not have a newer machine I'm using an older iMac so I don't actually have Thunderbolt or even USB 3.0 on this computer the drives
I have utilized USB 2.0 I think they could use 3.0 if I had it but right now I'mn using that older technology I would recommend if you have a computer with Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 absolutely take advantage of an external drive that has his connectivity that's going to give you even faster read and write times from your DAW and with your samples so you're gonna get a lot better performance one other thing you may want to consider with external drives is going with a solid-state drive or SSD external now I do not have an SSD at this time but it's something that I'm definitely considering the reasons for it being number one these drives with the the mechanical physical aspects of them they are a little bit loud there's fans in these and so I'm recording next to my computer that's always a concern and so sometimes I have to turn those off just to keep things nice and quiet also the SSDs are going to give you much better performance again they're going to be very fast especially if you have that newer connectivity technology like thunderbolt like USB 3.0 they are quite a bit more expensive than the older technology however moving forward they are going to be the way to go in terms of performance alright so that's a couple of quick thoughts on using external hard drives with your DAW. I can promise you if you're not utilizing this right now as soon as you start saving your sessions and saving a lot of your audio content onto the external it's going to make your DAW run so much better and keep your workflow a lot smoother and also keep your backups more consistent and have you better organized.
