External Hard Drives

[noelk27]

My poor (not so) old Rocpro 225 has gone to the great hard drive gig in the sky, and my immediate thinking was to replace it with the current Rocpro 850. But, before I do, wondered if anyone has experience of Rocstor and the likes of ProAvio's DV Box, Glyph's GTO50Q, Avastor's HDX800, or the new AV Drive from CalDigit. Any of these drives would be used for supporting ProTools sessions in operation, but not for storage of finished sessions (as completed session files are transferred to a separate back-up array).

Edited November 14, 2010 by noelk27

[Jean-Luc Pickguard]

Is it the actual HDD inside the housing that's gone? If so it might be worth chucking in a new one, possibly of larger capacity. I had some externals die over the years and it was always maxtor drives inside that had failed which I replaced with better drives which are still in daily use.

[noelk27]

No, it's the power circuit that's fried. The ability to service and upgrade an external hard drive is an option I like, as it usually is the disk itself that goes first. One of the reasons the CalDigit AV Drive would be a replacement outsider, if it didn't make such interesting claims about the enhanced Firewire transfer speeds.

Speaking about disks, has anyone used the latest version of the Seagate Momentus, the XT, with the solid state section?

[flyfisher]

I'd never heard of the Rocstor, so I had a quick look at the 850. Apart from the range of interfaces, I couldn't see anything particularly special about it. The review I read says it contains a Hitachi 3.5-inch, 7200rpm SATA hard drive. I use a number of these in my video editing PC and have not had any problems, so I'd guess they'll be OK for audio applications. I also use a number of LaCie and Western Digital external drives (firewire and USB2) without problems.

Out of interest, what interface do you use? eSATA is by far the fastest option and effectively allows the hard drive to run at its native speed, something that USB2 or Firewire cannot do (yet).

[noelk27]

USB2 previously (Rocstor 225). Mostly likely use Firewire 800 now.

[flyfisher]

If USB2 provided enough performance previously then anything should be OK. USB2, FW400 or FW800.

USB2 (480Mbps) might be nominally faster than FW400 but the software interface means it is actually slower for sustained data transfers. This is why tape-based digital camcorders were always FW400 instead of USB2. Even though the video data rate was only 25Mbps, USB2 couldn't be guaranteed to keep up.

A faster interface won't make any difference to the recording or playback process, although it will of course speed up any file transfers.

If you're really bothered about speed then eSATA is the way to go. Spend £20 or so on an eSATA card for your PC if you haven't already got one. You then get the convenience of an external drive with the speed of an internal one.