My friend is trying to finish his album on pro tools but is running out of hard drive space.

January 12, 2007 4:03 PM

My friend is trying to finish his album on pro tools but is running out of hard drive space.

Please help me try and consult him on this one. He currently has a g4 with two hard internal hard drives (one for the operating system, the other for his music files - the latter being about 100-150gb large, and partitioned in 4 for some reason). he also has an external for backup. My recommendation so far has been to back up and swap out this second internal hard drive (which is again, currently sized at 100-150gb, and almost full) in favor for a bigger one.
The only problem is I do not have any experience advising people who intend to use their hardware for music applications, and he absolutely insists that the hard drive must be 10,000RPM or faster. At places like newegg, I've searched through the 10,000RPM hard drives and noticed that they are all within the 72-150gb range. Since all the internal slots are full in the g4, there seems to be no way to upgrade - but clearly I cannot be the only person in the world with this problem, so I'm wondering, what the hell is going on here?

posted by phaedon to technology (11 answers total)

10,000 RPMs is serious overkill for audio editing.

Just get a nice 300 GB 7200 RPM external firewire drive with 8 or 16 MB of cache.
posted by b1tr0t at 4:09 PM on January 12, 2007

If your friend insists on editing at 10k RPMs, use the 300gb external drive to store finished tracks on the album, and move the current working project to one of the internal 10k drives (if the internal drives are actually 10k)
posted by b1tr0t at 4:10 PM on January 12, 2007

High speed high capacity drives

here and here, so they definitely exist.
posted by tomble at 4:11 PM on January 12, 2007

Does OSX support on-the-fly disk compression? Modern processors are so much faster than disks, you can actually see a performance improvement when you enable compression, because it reduces the amount of data that has to transit the disk bottleneck. Oh, and you gain a bunch of space too.
posted by Myself at 4:14 PM on January 12, 2007

G4 Towers had IDE disks, so a Serial Attached SCSI disk isn't going to do the guy any good.
posted by b1tr0t at 4:16 PM on January 12, 2007

Listen to b1tr0t - As an audio professional, I can tell you that you don't have to drink the digidesign kool-ade. You can buy all the hot-swappable external Glyph drives you want, but you're never going to max out their performance unless you're using a rig I can almost promise he doesn't have.

What's the problem with getting a 300G firewire drive, copying everything over, and opening the sessions straight off of the drive? I do that all the time, and have never had any problems.

The fact is, Digi has certified 7200rpm drives, so you can be sure they'll be just fine.
posted by god hates math at 4:43 PM on January 12, 2007

What's the problem with getting a 300G firewire drive, copying everything over, and opening the sessions straight off of the drive? I do that all the time, and have never had any problems.

You can certainly do that, but this audio guy seems to believe in the voodoo magic of internal 10k drives. If it makes him feel better, let him use the external drive for archival storage, and use the internal drives to work. It won't make any practical difference, but could help work around the silly 10k requirement.
posted by b1tr0t at 5:04 PM on January 12, 2007

Thank you, gentlemen. All the answers are much appreciated.
posted by phaedon at 10:28 PM on January 12, 2007

Drive speed requirements depend on the number of simultaneous tracks. 10K is not helpful for your average project, but if you're mixing 72 tracks it might make a difference.
posted by fourcheesemac at 8:24 AM on January 13, 2007

OOC, what about 48 tracks? you think you need 10k?
posted by phaedon at 10:33 AM on January 13, 2007

OOC, what about 48 tracks? you think you need 10k?


No. A single 7200rpm drive can stream over 100 audio tracks @ 96khz, 24bit - if the tracks are contiguous and the drive under, say, 60% full.

Even a drive with fragmented files (from overdubs, etc.) should handle 48 tracks without any hassle.
posted by the_very_hungry_caterpillar at 12:31 PM on July 5, 2007