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  3. 5200 or 7200 hdd drive for VSL?

  • 5200 or 7200 hdd drive for VSL?

    P
    P

    Hey Folks,

    i´ve got an question about HDD witz 5200 and 7200.

    So the Problem is i will buy an macbookpro. 8 GB Ram and 3,06 GHZ. 500 GB HDD.

    At the moment i am not sure what is the best solutio for me. It´s important for me, that i can do orchestration and compostions on the road.

    So i have to buy an external haddisc drive for the soundlibaries. The Problem is that external haddisc drives via USB without external power online have 5200.

    If you want 7200 you have to buy an HDD with external power supply. But on the road there is not always the chance to get external power. So everything sould be working with the mac power.

    My question is, make it any sense that i buy an 5200 which get the power from the mac So i can compose everywhere i want or is that not so good cause the hdd is to slow for that?

    Are there any expiriences with that ? Or do you have any advice for me?

    Best wishes to all of you!

    Chris 

  • D
    D

    I would never try to stream from a drive slower than 7200. Couple that with the fact that you are using OSX, I think that with a 5200 it would be a recipe for disaster.

    DG
  • P
    P

    mhhh ok then my solution could be that i have my orchester basic on my laptop hdd. And the extension on the external hdd. So i can compose even if the the external hdd isn´t connect. The soundlibrary would be of course an extra partition on on the mac:) what do you think about this solution?

  • M
    M

    There are a lot 2.5" 7200 drives that can be USB-powered using an external case. However if you are planning on streaming using USB2-only it wouldn't really matter how fast the disc spins - it's going to be crap nonetheless (.

    eSata is the solution and maybe FW800 (don't know if there are 2.5" cases) but everything else is totally limiting hdds these days (USB2 has a limit of around 30MB/s which is a joke). Things will change once USB3 has finally been implemented everywhere, hopefully. :)
  • P
    P

    So which hd is would be a good choice?
    USB 2.0 or Firewire 800?

    Important is that there are no extern power supply needed.

  • M
    M

    Does that MacBook have eSata?

    If yes, go for that - best way for external drive right now. Because most prefabricated external drives are rather slow and 5400upm you should buy a single, empty case with an eSata port and a single 2,5" hdd with 7200upm (the new Seagate Momentus.4 500GB is awesome with an average read of 86MB, beginning at 100MB/s). Power is used from an additional USB port. Power-over-eSata is available, but still new and rarely seen yet.

    If it does not have eSata the only choice would be FW800. But it's still not the best performance-wise (roughly 50MB/s max, I think). For options on that front just check out products over at alternate.de under festplatten / firewire / 2,5 zoll. I suppose, the Western Digital ones are probably the best.

    Of course it all depends on how much you intend to stream from that drive. If it's only a solo instrument than maybe USB2 would be enough. ;)
  • P
    P

    Thanks for that info:)

    mhhh....

    I think at first i will do the follow thing:

    The Macbook pro Internal Drive got an space of 500 GB

    I will do the partitions as follow

    Partion 1: 50 GB for OSX

    Partion 2: 50 GB for WinXP

    Partion 3: 150 GB for Data

    Partion 4: 250 GB for my soundlibraries (Orchester and so on)

    For further soundlibraries i will do that with an external fw800 dirve

    What do you think about this configuration?
  • M
    M

    It's still the same physical drive the OS is installed on - regardless of how many partitions you create - and that's never really recommended. ;)

    However, just try that first and see if the performance is good enough for your needs. If not, you can still go and grab an external one.
  • P
    P

    Hey Mad:)

    i know that it is better with an external one:) But as if you said, when it works and it´s ok then its cool:) If the performance not good, so there isn´t no alternate than to buy an external drive...:)