However, be aware that the off-the-shelf option will usually come with a basic 5400 RPM drive inside it. This is basically a SATA drive in a factory sealed USB 3.0 enclosure, ready to plug and play. This is not going to be suitable for audio recording but should be fine for pure storage purposes and has many other benefits, but I’ll look at NAS options in my next article.įor most people, the external USB 3.0 option will be the easiest route, especially if you just purchase a ‘portable desktop drive’ from your favourite online retailer (avoid ‘portable’ USB drives as they require much more system power). Or if you have a spare SATA port inside your computer you could attach the drive to this and get excellent transfer speeds.įinally there’s also the option of using network attached storage (NAS), where your drive is connected to your network router. Other ‘external’ options include firewire (found on older Mac systems), thunderbolt (expensive and limited choice) and eSATA, as well as the older USB 2.0 system. So how do we connect our drive to our computer? Most modern computers will at least have the option for USB 3.0 and that’s certainly fast enough for our needs. IMO a 7200 RPM mechanical drive is the best compromise. In that case, if you can afford it, an SSD would be great for recording audio to, but overkill for a ‘storage-only’ system. That said, if our system utilises multiple backup archives (as covered in my next article), this probably won't be too much of a concern. SSD drives will certainly give you the fastest read and write speeds, but jury is still out over whether SSD drives should be used for long term storage. However if you also intend using the drive to record audio then you’ll need to get the fastest drive you can afford – at least 7200 RPM. If you are using this drive purely for storage purposes, then a 5400 RPM SATA drive should be absolutely fine for your needs. The obvious choice is to go for a standard mechanical SATA drive here as it’s much more cost effective compared to an SSD. You could also use this drive as your scratch disk for your DAW to which you record all your audio tracks to, although as we’ll see, this will impact the specifications required of the drive.Īs we’ll be storing large amounts of data, I’d say you’ll definitely need at least 1TB of storage, probably more. To make our lives nice and easy we first need to set up a primary disk to handle our audio library (or libraries).
Without some sensible and coherent system in place you’ll soon find yourself losing beats, mislaying sounds and generally spending more time trudging through folders than actual beat making! Step 1: Choose a Primary Storage Disk One aspect of beat making that often gets overlooked by producers is the efficient management of their projects and ever-growing sound library.
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