Computer Drives

Step 7 – Computer Drives Guide

| Back To Build A Computer - Homepage

How Important Are My Drives For My Computer?

Your computer drives are very important for one simple reason. They store the data on your computer. That means all the beautiful music tracks you produce or record will be stored on this one piece of hardware.

The amount of computer storage space required for your setup weighs heavily on what type of work you are going to encounter. I recommend at least 80GB’s of space to start off good. My physical drives total 240GB’s.

When you record massive amounts of audio the hard drive space will be eaten up and that can cause problems such as pops, tracks freezes and even shut downs with no saved data. Ouch! I learned this early with my first Cakewalk software years ago…lol.

*Normally your CPU load will be indicated on your recording or production software.(Pay close attention to it)

Internal / Physical Hard Drive Tips!

• Break up drives! If you need 160GB buy two 80GB drives (This increase performance when retrieving audio files) 
• Spindle speed (RPM) should rotate at a minimum of 7200

What Will An 80GB Hard Drive Hold

• 20 two-hour DVD-quality movies or
• 80 hours of VHS-quality video or
• 55 days of around-the-clock MP3 audio or
• 20,000 vivid digital photos or
• 114 action-packed games!

Should I Buy An External Drive and Why?

Computer Drives Guide

Yes! Yes! Yes! – Why?

Easy Data Transfer (Portability)

If you plan on getting out of your studio an external hard drive provides you the flexibility to take a large amount of data files along with you. Now the Pro Tools session or tracked out audio wav files are ready for another computer. (Good for mastering houses or collaboration production)

Necessary File Back-up!

God forbid you have a melt down and your files are not backed up on an External Drive. Ouch! Some people back up data on DVDs or CD-Roms. That is prehistoric and way to time consuming. You will end up with 100’s of disc laying all over the place.

Simply buy an external drive and make life easy. The simplicity of installing them is as easy as plugging into a USB(2.0) port of FIREWIRE. I use Glyph external drives for my backup and I love them.

External Drive Tips!

• Rotatational speed should be minimum of 7200 RPM
• Interface should support FIREWIRE
• Buffer size (Cache) 8MB

• *Optional but recommended Get an external drive that qualifies with all major audio production packages that support FireWire recording, including Digidesign Pro Tools, Steinberg Nuendo and Cubase, Emagic Logic, MOTU Digital Performer, Cakewalk Sonar, Sonic Foundry Vegas and more...