Like the title says- please recommend an external hard drive that you’ve had good experiences with. I am in the middle of frantically trying to copy large session files over to another HD as I can tell the hard drive I’m working on is starting to crap out. The hard drive I’m copying to is solid in terms of I can pull things off of it but it tends to crap out when actually working on a session off of it. The current drive has been a work horse but is now getting glitchy and making weird noises and I can tell it’s about to give up the ghost.
So do you have a hard drive that has performed well for you in terms of performance when working on sessions (I use Reaper mostly)?
there is no rock solid external HD. many are very good but you can find failures in every brand.
your best bet is to get a RAID set up w/redundancy. either simple RAID mirror w/2 drives that show up as one drive (easy to set up) so whatever you write to it is copied. if one drive fails you just buy another one and put it in. the RAID will rebuild itself. read the fine print though as hardware vs software raid set ups can have different features.
the bullet proof back up is a RAID 5 with parity. not really a portable situation.
i use a portable drive for Time Machine back up but all the important stuff is backed up to RAID 5 w/parity and some things are on RAID mirror set up.
if you’re on a mac there’s lot’s of options here:
the single drives i have around for moving things around sometimes… are WD or seagate. i think i have a toshiba somewhere too. anyway… ymmv. if you need portability then that helps make your decision for you. if it’s for stay home studio then i’d look at different raid set ups and see what makes sense for you
TL;DR: RAID5 sounds great on paper. In reality, RAID5 is worse than no backup, because as soon as you see the first sign of failure, your entire array is dead.
Longer:
Most RAID5 arrays are built out of identical disks with sequential serial numbers. The RAID5 controller ensures even writes across the array. Since the disks are all from the same batch and all have the same number of hours, failures tend to be clustered. When you start to get errors, the array tries to rebuild missing data from the remaining drives, increasing the read rate, racing towards failure.
Recommendation:
Use a high quality recent SSD for your primary storage. Consumer drives produced in the last 2-3 years can sustain far more reads and writes than older drives, so now might be a good time to upgrade.
For backups, mirror to decent quality spinning disks. If you want/need offsite backups, then make a second mirror to send to the offsite location.
For commercial projects with $$ on the line, look into professional grade cloud backup providers. If you are comfortable syncing things to S3, then Glacier is cheap.
Source: I’ve managed A/V content editing pool storage at scale and RAID5 always, always ends in tears. I’ve lost arrays where recreating $70k+ of content was cheaper than data recovery.
Finally, a backup solution that you have never restored from is an incomplete backup solution.
Thanks all for the responses. The back up went fine so all is good in that department. I will just make a habit of regularly backing up any important sessions when I am done for the day. The part I’m still trying to figure out is which drive will perform best while I am recording to and playing back from the external drive. What I am hearing you all say is that a modern sdd drive should perform well and quickly transfer data so as to not cause glitches and lags in the audio. Is that correct?
That is correct, but here is how to verify for yourself.
Consider the WD Blue series, a general purpose drive that is available in a variety of sizes and interfaces and usually sells for comparatively low prices.
According to the data sheet, the 500GB and better SATA drives can all write at up to 530 MB/s, with a TBW (endurance) capacity of 200 TB for the 500, 400 TB for the 1TB and 500 and 600 TB for the 2 and 4TB drives respectively.
First, write speed:
write speed is usually slower than read speed, and this is the case here, so we will use the worst case number.
Spinning disks could often burst far above their actual read capacity, but SSDs can usually sustain close to the peak, so this should be a fairly honest number with which to judge a drive
16 bit audio at 44 KHz = 2 bytes * 44,100 samples/sec = 88,200 bytes / sec = 88k /sec
24 bit audio at 96 KHz = 3 bytes * 96,000 samples/sec = 288,000 bytes / sec = 288 k/sec
At 530 MB/s, we can write 530,000 KB/s / 288 K/s = 1,840 simultaneous mono 24/96 streams to disk. If you prefer to work in stereo, you will have to be satisfied with 920 simultaneous streams.
The M.2 drives have even more read/write bandwidth, and WD’s black series is faster still. Both are overkill for audio. Realistically, you will be constrained by your CPU and memory before you are constrained by the read/write performance of even consumer SSDs.
Finally, TBW / endurance:
TBW is the Total Bytes Written before the drive fails. More TBW is better. 200TBW means that you can safely write 200TB of data to the drive over the lifetime of the drive before it dies.
Recommendation:
At $230 for a 2TB SSD, just get a pair of WD Blues. Either setup mirroring in the OS, or configure a nightly batch job or just manually copy over to the backup drive.
Samsung is a good choice if you want something a little “better” than the WD, but the gap between WD and Samsung is smaller today than it was in years past.
The most expensive consumer drives are intended for gamers. I would avoid them for professional work because their specs and general scuttlebutt strongly suggest that they are enterprise-grade drives that didn’t make the cut. That’s fine for gaming, where all of your critical data is in the cloud and you want maximum local read times. It’s not good at all for A/V archives when low-end drives have more than enough bandwidth and are very reliable.
I’ve been storing my jams on an external HDD but I have no backup so I started to move them over Dropbox (I have the 1T plan), it’s slow and time consuming (as it will sometimes fail while uploading…).
So I would like to buy an SSD for backup (and quick access) and another for sample libraries. The backup one does not need to be very fast while the sample library one should be fast enough.
So is 530 MB/s enough for sample libraries or should I go with 1000MB/s?
I only have 2 thunderbolt 3 ports and I didn’t see any hub offering 3.2v2(or whatever the name they gave to the latest USB standard…) only 3.0. When I record I need my MacBook Pro to be plugged and I need the other port for my audio interface so an external Thunderbolt SSD seems unrealistic for me (I didn’t see one offering an extra Thunderbolt port for chaining…). Which would mean that I would be limited to USB3.0 and I assume that 1000MB/s or even 530MB/s is not achievable or is it?
if one of the Samsung SSD at 530MB/s is good enough, I would buy 2: one for backup, one for sample libraries.
backup 1: 1T SSD
backup 2: 1T Dropbox
would be safe enough?
my 2021 production is using around 100GB so 1TB should be enough I think.
I honestly do not think cloud is safe enough to put my thingies onto it.
I have an external ssd for really everything I have. That was expensiv as fun, because size matters. Always with me. It’s not a work drive, its a storage…
That is backuped onto a mirrored raid, staying at home.
Then I have it backuped on two external discs (same power supplies in case one of them goes bonkers!), one of the drive is at my studio, the other one at my parents place.
At home there is daily backup, regulary at my work place, and as often as I can visit my parents I backup it there too.
It looks like the Atmos has a bay for a 2.5" SATA drive, so any of the Samsung or WD SATA drives should be fine. For video, you should list out all of the 2TB drives that fit in your budget, and then buy the one with the greatest TBW / endurance value, since that will determine how much video you can transfer through the device before it starts to drop your critical media.
If you are moving a lot of media around, consider buying more smaller drives, since the smaller drives usually have more TBW capacity per TB than the bigger ones
I can’t recommend a 2.5" enclosure, I had to try several different M.2 enclosures to find one that works reliably.
The cloud is great for commercial projects when time is measured in dollars. Take it down if it isn’t earning you money. Bill the client if you can.
I would not bet that Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple will be around in the same form as they are today in 20 years. I can get USB-SCSI and USB-IDE bridges to read 30-40 year old drives.
2 TB HDD (now full, replaced with 6TB HDD) for backing up. Placed outside of my studio.
Backblaze continues cloud backup. Unlimited data, cheap. Mainly for when shit hits the fan and everything fails. Drives it backs up need to be connected at least once in 30 days to retain data. So this really is for when a computer crashes, a hardrive fails and no recent backup was made to a HDD.
15TB cloud drive. Mainly used to store music projects and important video projects permanently in the cloud.
sorry, but thats not my experience… individual drives do not suddenly fail ALL at the same time.
failures are non-deterministic.
what is important, is replacing drives quickly when they do fail … as on raid 5, you only have one failure spare… so keep a spare drive. of course, you could move to raid 6 and have 2 spare.
also, you don’t have to buy a pre-built raid system, you can just buy the enclosure and drives… the drives just need to be ‘same’ spec/performance … so usually thats same brand/model, not same batch.
also the good thing is, depending on your needs, you can choose different raid configurations… eg. use raid 1, if you want a ‘mirror’ - raid configurations are largely, a trade off of performance/storage and cost
setting up a raid nas was a bit costly, but best thing Ive done…as it means don’t need to think so much about backups.
bare in mind, single backups/raid do not protect you from:
single location risk -
e.g fire, cloud/offsite storage is needed for this.
user/application error
an app writing a corrupt version of the file to disk…
this requires versioning, or multiple backups (being rotated)
… this ones easy to forget with raid , as my partner found out a while ago !
that’s interesting information! i have a couple raids… one is raid 5 w/parity. so any disk can fail and i won’t lose anything. i didn’t buy all the drives at the same time but they are all same make etc. i use it strictly for back up and it’s not something that gets lot’s of read/write constantly.
i use SSDs in a raid mirror for my active audio recording drive and a 2nd raid mirror for backing up all the photos and music library stuff.
i had one drive fail on the RAID 5 set up years ago and i just pulled out the bad drive… put in another one and it rebuilt. that’s the only failure i’ve had. the enclosure for the RAID has a little dial on the enclosure and raid type is selected by turning the dial.
if i get into changing things down the road i will certainly revisit the situation based on your comment. thanks!
