Laptop Hardrive - what would you recommend

Casual Beats · Post by **Casual Beats** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 7:02 am

2 questions -
1. I have a compaq nx9010 laptop P4 2.8ghz/1gb ram and an 80gb hard drive. Unfortunately the hard drive is only 4200rpm. I am going to upgrade the internal drive to (hopefully) a 7200rpm one and am planning on adding an external drive. For the external drive, what do you guys recommend, a usb 2.0 or firewire drive?

2. Also, just curious as to how you guys load your programs across your drives - ie, do you just use one large internal drive and partition it - putting the Live program on one partition and the audio on another or do you use two drives and put the program on one and the audio on the external drive? thanks.

sqook · Post by **sqook** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 7:42 am

External firewire, all the way. Don't even think of USB; it doesn't have the bursting capabilities of firewire, so even though USB2 claims to transfer data at the same speeds as fw400, in practice it is much, much slower.

And I actually keep all of my loops, samples, and other crap on my internal laptop hard drive, because I don't usually carry my hard drive around with me and use it mostly as a backup and extra storage device. Partitioning your hard drive (ie, live on one part, and your music on another) will have virtually zero effect on your performance, as the only time the two will be reading from the same partition is when you start up the program. After that, the entire program executable is loaded into ram and/or virtual memory, so if you really want to improve performance, put your swap file on a different partition.

Despite this, I find that it's better to optimize for CPU by bouncing and pre-warping all of your loops, not using midi instruments in a live setting, etc. I barely have any problems with disk sluggishness at all.

netchaiev · Post by **netchaiev** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 9:48 am

Totally agree w/ Sqook. I just got the new 100Gb 7200rpm hitachi drive for my lappy and it's awesome!Very quiet, doesn't eat up my battery. My big external FW drive is for backup, and never leaves my studio. The old drive is in a small case and contains my itunes library (35Gb). Travel light is the point.

quandry · Post by **quandry** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 2:58 pm

I guess I differ from the other responses. My laptop can get pretty hot with the 4,800, and maybe I'm making erroneous assumptions, but I think a 7,200 drive would only cause more heat. I think the ideal and most efficient use of hard drives and Ableton is to use two drives at once--internal for running the application, and a fast external 7,200 FW with at least 8 MB cache for all of your audio files and live set. I can tell you from personal testing on my system that my internal drive struggles to record 7 tracks of 24/48 audio at once, where just switching my record folder to the external fw drive gets me 16 tracks at once with headroom to spare. Of course, if I had a 7,200 internal, things might be different, but just my 2 cents. Worth investigating as to specs beyond the rpm--doesn't the cache make a difference--what are the internal cache specs vs. external fw specs (I've seen some with 16 MB cache recently).

Ryan

tim-e · Post by **tim-e** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 3:37 pm

A 5400rpm drive should be sufficient. Personally, I love Samsung notebook disks.