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store music on internal or external hard drive?

post #1 of 6
3/22/11 at 2:26pm
Thread Starter 

I'm a noob, so forgive the noobish question. It seems like it would be better to store music on my laptop's internal hard drive to avoid noise from the extra USB or Firewire cord, etc. However, the Pure Music folks say an external drive is better--something about competing for hard drive resources. I can't hear a difference, so maybe it's a moot point for me, but I'm curious about other people's opinions/experiences.

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post #2 of 6
3/22/11 at 2:31pm

External drives are the way to go jk....  I have all my music mirrored between a NAS & WD 2TB external, using ethernet and wireless with five computers all over the house.  It's perfect with no noise, dropouts etc....Good times...

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post #3 of 6
3/22/11 at 2:47pm

How about both? I play my music from my internal HDD (faster) but have everything backed up on my external HDD.

 

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post #4 of 6
3/22/11 at 11:53pm

I store all my music on a 6 drive (6x500gb) RAID-5 across gigabit lan from a low end file server that cost about 600 to build, such a fantastic investment, this is what I would recommend.

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post #5 of 6
3/23/11 at 1:45am

Honestly? For the kind of use we're talking about there's no speed difference between the two. Even a base USB 2.0 connection (base because everything is at least that or better these days) will get you a practical transfer speed of 50 Mbps or so. That's more than enough to transfer even the highest grade raw audio with no latency issues.

 

The benefit of having everything on an external is your system isn't constantly reading from your primary drive. If you're using it for other things there will be a marginal speed increase to normal operations. Nothing extreme, we're talking a millisecond here and there.

 

When it was just my laptop and I didn't have as much room as I'd like, I went with an external HDD for all my audio. Now that I have a 1TB in a desktop it's all on one drive (I also sprang for a faster drive anyway). That's all synced with a full system backup and a copy of my library on my laptop (larger, but slower drive in there).

 

The suggestion of an NAS is a great one. Data redundancy means you never really risk losing anything should a drive fail (rare but it happens) and if you're clever about it you can set it up as a centralized media server so you can pull audio to multiple devices with a minimal fuss.

 

I'm in the process of specing out my own server as it is but what I'm looking at is going to cost a fair more than $600. If I go with an all-in-one pre-built case that alone is looking to cost me $800 or so, not to mention a few 2TB drives.

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post #6 of 6
3/23/11 at 9:29am

There is no difference in sound quality. If you have a ton of songs, it may take longer to load your library and begin playback of songs with an external, but the convenience is nice.

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