Ext. Hard Drive Woes: To build or not to build?

[thenewrobot]

Does anybody out there use a dedicated external audio drive?

I'm recording to a laptop and need to get a dedicated audio drive, but I'm not exactly sure what kind of specs I need in order to record effectively with minimal latency.

So far I know that I need a 7200 RPM drive. I'm thinking a 16mb cache should do the trick, but don't know what kind of seek time/write time I should be looking for.

Are there any good pre-assembled drives out there or am I gonna have to build one myself?

[fivewest]

I would highly recommend any of the Seagate external drives. In my experience, Seagate has been of the utmost quality. Western Digital is also very reliable. I would stay away from the Maxtor's. I've had to RMA quite a few of them for work, and I wasn't very impressed.

[brandondrury]

Honestly, I don't put too much tough into the hard drives anymore. I've played around with quite a few different hard drives over the years and really haven't noticed any performance gains. I'm not sure if the hard drive effects latency. I could be wrong on that one. It's more of a CPU issue than a hard drive seek time issue.

Are there any good pre-assembled drives out there or am I gonna have to build one myself?

If it was me, I'd snag one of those $25 kits and just put a standard IDE hard drive into it and put the rest of the cash into my back pocket. I've used several of these over the years and I've always been happy with them.

In my experience, Seagate has been of the utmost quality. Western Digital is also very reliable. I would stay away from the Maxtor's.

Interesting. My experience is the complete opposite. Maxtor's have been the most reliable BY FAR for me. I guess your mileage will vary.

Brandon

[Charlie_M]

Originally Posted by brandondrury

Interesting. My experience is the complete opposite. Maxtor's have been the most reliable BY FAR for me. I guess your mileage will vary.

The thing is that is all in the past. Maxtor was acquired by Seagate over a year ago. Anything on the shelf today with the Maxtor brand on it was likely made after the acquisition, and during some stage of the shutdown/integration of various facilities into the larger combined organization. Not so say those are for sure bad drives now... for the right price and with proper backup discipline i might be a good way to go. I would consider it a risk but have no good way to quantify that risk....