External hard drives for Logic Pro

[moonbass]

Hi. I'm after a bit of advice regarding recording on Logic:
I started off recording just using my iMac and saving everything to its internal hard drive. This has been fine until now but I'm starting to run out of space. (I know I should have got an external drive from the start, but never thought I'd be doing as much home recording as I am.)

So my questions are: what hard drive should I get? Do I need two for samples and project files? I understand that it's best to get non-'green' 7200rpm firewire drives; is this true? And how do I safely transfer my current files over to a new hard drive? I currently back up to a wireless TimeMachine; is this good enough for backups, or should I use something else?
Any thoughts muchly appreciated.
Andy.

[paul_5]

Faster hard drives mean the access time is quicker, so yes, 7200rpm is about the minimum speed for multi-track audio recording. Not sure about using separate drives for samples and project files - it all depends on how well organized the drive is. If you've got enough RAM then you should be able to get away with one drive for everything, as the samples and audio will be cached in the RAM when the project opens, so in theory you're not accessing the HD as often as you think.

Record to just one drive at a time (don't use external FW drive AND internal drive when recording tracks) or most systems tend to fall over.

As far as backups go, as long as you do it regularly then that can be whatever speed you like, as it should be done as a dedicated housekeeping task AFTER you've closed Logic, not at the same time.

I haven't used Logic for a long, long time, but you should be able to transfer projects to there new drive by using [i]File>Save a copy as[/i] and then sending that to the new drive. Make sure that if you're asked, you save copies of all the audio takes to the new drive too.

Word of warning though, when you're about to start using a new piece of hardware it's always worth doing a complete backup!

You could make your life easier and more organized) by removing any audio unused regions as part of your backup process, you might be surprised how much space you'll save.

Sorry it's a bit long winded, but I hope it helps.

[BigRedX]

If you're iMac supports it a drive with a FW800 interface would be even better.

I run all my Logic stuff - project files, audio files and samples from a completely separate drive to my system one.

[paul_5]

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1343038785' post='1744000']
If you're iMac supports it a drive with a FW800 interface would be even better.
[/quote]

Yeah, FW800 really shifts!

[moonbass]

Thanks for all the advice chaps - very useful. Any suggestions on models of hard drive to go for?
While I'm at it, how would upgrading my RAM benefit recording? I have occasionally caused a spinning wheel of death when using a lot of tracks with multiple effects, and sometimes latency becomes a problem when running mastering effects while trying to record. Would upgrading RAM solve this? (I've currently got 4GB using 2 slots, but I think I can upgrade to 16GB with 4x4GB).
A.

[moonbass]

Oh, and is there an easy way to remove audio unused regions to free up memory?

[BigRedX]

Do you mean memory or disk space?

And silent/unused portions within a take or complete takes that aren't being used?

[moonbass]

Er, I think I mean RAM; I think it's called DRAM on the Apple support site. Isnt this what limits how many effects you can use at one time? I could be talking twaddle of course!

And I was thinking about removing unused audio files to free up memory. I can understand how just silenced bits (eg by automation) would be harder to get rid of, but wondered if there was a shortcut to getting rid of unused audio (ie: takes that are stored but not used if you know you've finished editing a track.)

[Chrismanbass]

hi mate saw this thread and spoke to Richard Lightman ([url="http://www.richardlightman.com/"]http://www.richardlightman.com/[/url]) about it and this is the model he suggested as its the one he uses

[url="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitachi-G-Drive-7200-2xFW-eSata/dp/B002RAXM9W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343046572&sr=8-1"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitachi-G-Drive-7200-2xFW-eSata/dp/B002RAXM9W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343046572&sr=8-1[/url]

[paul_5]

more RAM (physical RAM in the two slots) will increase the amount of simultaneous processing that Logic can do, so that's always worth a punt. That said, I'm using 20+ tracks in Pro Tools 10.2 on a 13" Macbook Pro (dual 2.4GHz and 4GB of RAM), but then, I'm a bit of a troglodyte and do most of my processing out of the box.

Mmmm, old school.

[BigRedX]

As paul_5 says adding more RAM will allow Logic to do more things, but IIRC if the audio can't be held in RAM it will be streamed from the disk so, if you have insufficient RAM or (more likely) processor power, getting rid of unused audio will have a minimal effect.

You should check the CPU and Disk Usage meters to see what is happening while you are running a project.

If regions aren't being used on the arrange page you can delete them from the Audio Bin using the Select All Unused command. You can then delete all the audio files with no used regions from the Audio Bin two with the option to either just remove them from the project or physically delete the files from the hard drive.

One trick with audio files that I've found useful on slower machines is if you have a track with lots of edits in it, re-render the edits as a single audio file which helps with disk access.

[moonbass]

Thanks guys, you're all bloomin' marvellous! I now have some shopping and tidying to do!
Andy

[paul_5]

If you've got the option 'make inactive' can save CPU and RAM (don't know if Logic has this, but in PT it can be a lifesaver) - basically tell the computer to ignore the track selected - takes it out of the mix, and frees up CPU and RAM. Useful if you've rendered a region but don't want to delete it 'just in case'...

[Archetype]

I do have a 400GB lacie FW800 drive im wanting to shift
its two drives in a RAID stripe to give it some better speeds - thrown a few large protools sessions of 80+ tracks and it didn't glitch once.

[simonc61]

Personally I use G-Tech external drives. I've heard a lot of bad things about Lacie from photographer friends so I won't go near them. I gather these are the industry standard with a lot of studios - http://www.glyphtech.com/ - expensive but what price would you put on your digital creations?

[Archetype]

I've never had and issue with Lacie myself - and thats 8 years in IT.
It all depends who made the drives - thanksfully mine is the good days of Western Digital before they got stupid.

[BigRedX]

Not to piss on Archetype's attempted sale, but in all honesty I couldn't recommend one of these Lacie drives. Firstly it's going to be old which brings it ever closer to its MTTF, secondly IIRC there is no way to bypass the RAID formatting. RAID 0 is the worst kind of RAID because there is no redundancy and if either one of the two drives in the casing fails all your data is gone. These days modern drives are big enough and fast enough not to require tricks like RAID 0 to get the speed and capacity out of them.