Hello,

Apologies for boring question, I've had a look for decent answers and not found anything concise.

I want a new external hard drive to run my logic projects from.

It's been a long time since I've had to think about this and I need to update myself.

In the past it was always said to go with firewire and then thunderbolt hard drives or ssd because of something about the way they transfer the data.

Is this something to consider these days?

What is a good interface to use for external hard drives? I would like the quickest possible without bankruptcy.

I imagine that these days people just use ordinary usb c drives and they perform well enough not have to consider these things anymore but I'd like to hear some advice from someone who runs big projects.

many thanks.

USB is perfectly fine, but you'll definitely want a solid-state drive instead of the old-school SATA drive. SATA drives are cheap and great for things like Time Machine backups or remote storage of big archived files, but not for running software or samples.

Solid-state external drives are getting very affordable, and I have many of them for storing and running massive libraries (Native Instruments, Spitfire, Garritan CFX, Toontrack, etc). I just got the Samsung models that are everywhere, I think I have like 4TB of them at this point. They get the job done.

Loading Garritan CFX Concert Grand from a SATA drive takes forever, like a full minute just to pull up a preset. The solid state drive gets it done in a couple seconds. Way worth it!

I'm not on Mac, but I bought a bunch of wd 4tb sn850x ssd over the past month.

Stuck some of them into quick-release Sabrent usb enclosures....some of them into quick-release Sabrent thunderbolt enclosures.

Blazingly fast & easy on windows 11 pro.

Unless your Mac is quite old your internal drive is plenty fast enough for projects. Use an external drive for backup and archiving completed projects.

Yes, skip hard drives, get an SSD.

Just look at transfer speeds and pick what your wallet can bear then. But realistically a good computer with a good drive can do really well with just a good old USB (SSD) drive. Pick 3.x, Type-A or Type-C connector. Thunderbolt might be overkill.

Define "big".

It could be channel/track count, it could be amount of edits... are you running 24-bit / 48kHz or is it 32-bit float / 192kHz or something equally silly?

Solid State is the drive type, SATA the transfer protocol. Drives that are both are very common.

I think you meant to say 'spinning hard drives', not "SATA", right?

Other than that I agree with you of course.

I was under the very likely incorrect assumption that the SATA protocol was a term used interchangeably with spinning-disk hard drives! So yes, I apologize for any confusion. I was referring to the spinning magnetic disk variety.

SSD internal for apps. SSD external for work. HD 24/7 (eg Seagate Ironwolf) for back up.

Actually no real need for external at all unless you need the work "to-go"...

Thank you for your replies.

Since the dawn of time I've been using external drives for my projects and the internal for the apps etc.
I can't remember exactly what the info was but in my mind I was told a long time ago that the firewire and thunderbolt interface transfers a more constant stream of data whereas USB transfers it in dumps and therefor the thunderbolt is more suitable for music production.

Now, after everyone saying and modern USBc SSD would be plenty fast enough these days, I want to show what I've found.

For the last few years I've been using an SSD housed in an old lace rugged casing, using thunderbolt 2.
I forget what the SSD is inside and actually what the interface in the drive actually is (but I can check it out when I get a moment).

I've been a bit concerned that the drive is getting a bit old and I have to use a thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 4 adapter with my laptop which is prone to disconnecting so I wanted to get something new.

I just bought a Samsung t9, which is USB and started using it in the same way having seen that the transfer speeds look very good.

However when I work on the same project on the new t9 drive I can occasionally hear clicks on playback when I zoom in and out or highlight different tracks and stuff like that. On the exact same project when I use the old SSD over thunderbolt 2 there are no clicks.

This is not good news. I'll be returning the T9 I guess and probably looking for some sort of thunderbolt external drive but that's not that easy, and it's expensive and I still do not understand how this can be and what the actual differences are between the two.

How old is your laptop? Does it have an SSD for its internal drive.

If it’s a relatively recent laptop (with a decade or so) and has an SSD, use the internal drive for your projects. The advice to use external drives is ancient and from the time when internal drives were spinning disks which are orders of magnitude slower.

The laptop is less than a year old and has an SSD.

Are you sure there are no benefits to using an external drive these days?

I’m quite positive, especially for audio. The bandwidth of a modern internal SSD is far more than you need. Use the external for backup and archive.

There used to be benefits but those days are long past.

the only benefit to using an external is space.

Moderm Mac's have expensive disks so using an external is more cost effective.

I have an internal 2TB NVMe in my laptop and use a 4TB NVMe drive in a TB 4 chassis for my sample libs etc.


M

True, the benefit of an external is cost per given capacity.

For an example of an active project recording.
24-bit, 96kHz, 10 tracks = 3 MB/s (rounded)
( I used https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/audio-file-size to calculate). If you look at a modern SSD, they benchmark starting around 1000 MB/s and going up from there (minus some outliers, but those are even still at least 200x from what I see here: https://www.tomshardware.com/feature...-ssd-hierarchy)

Exactly. Speed was NEVER a reason to use external hard drives, all other things being equal of course.

Modern external hard drives are plenty fast nowadays, even a regular $30 spinning disk drive through USB gets you 100 mb/s or more. I avoid native instruments like the plague so I don't know how well those HDD transfer speeds work for kontakt libraries, but external SSDs are only a little bit more if you're worried. I personally use external drives for all my projects, since the file structure and setup of my DAW lets me use external drives to seamlessly switch between my laptop and PC.

not sure what 100 mb/s is supposed to enumerate.

if you see 500 MBps on a solid state drive, it does usually mean Megabytes per second.
if you are running USB 3.0 and hitting close to that rate, it should be pretty good.
if you want to get 4 times that, you could end up utilising a bunch of PCIe lanes for no real benefit.
so imo, the safest approach might often be to max out a USB 3.0 specification and see how that goes.

You need to give a bit more information probably. In both Windows and OSX you can usually go look for the drive to see if the computer recognizes that it has been connected. If it's connected and the computer sees it but it doesn't show up in the explorer/finder then it can be a problem with formatting or whatever. If it doesn't even show up at all then it could be anything from a bad cable to a different serious drive error.