External Hard Drive

[DJWilson]

Hi,

Quick question to everyone who uses a laptop as part of their set-up.

Do you store and run your music off of an external hard drive or save them locally on the laptop?

[Excalibur]

Hi,

Quick question to everyone who uses a laptop as part of their set-up.

Do you store and run your music off of an external hard drive or save them locally on the laptop?

The answer to this will depend simply on the size of your collection ( in Gigabytes ) and the size of your hard drive. Until two years ago, I was external all the way. Then I bought a laptop with a 2Tb hard drive, and went internal.

I now run one internal, one external. In my humble opinion, internal is better if you can.

[yourdj]

Macbook 1 x 1tb in the main slot and 1 x 2tb in the CD drive area.
Sure you could easily get 4tb total ssd now, not looked in ages.

Most of that is not music though - thats about 50-60 gig probably in total so I could probably do my job on 250 gb HDD I would imagine??

[DazzyD]

I went from using external drives to upgrading to a souped up laptop with and 1.5Tb internal drive. My reasoning was that I felt the external drives had a weak link in the power supplies and/or casing. I'd had about 4 different external drive units but several more cases with power supply as the originals had failed. Since moving to internal I've not had any problems.

[DJWilson]

Thanks for the input!

Being internal there should be less strain on the CPU.

Time for some laptop shopping...

[yourdj]

Thanks for the input!

Being internal there should be less strain on the CPU.

Time for some laptop shopping...

I still use a 2011 MacBook, never misses a beat and only cost £400 2-3 years ago.
SSD is key and a large ram, but with Djing my CPU drain is tiny using Serato.

[Spirits High]

I use 500gb external hds on both main playout and back up. Never really gone down the internal route as they just aren’t big enough. I know there are laptops with 1tb internals but I do wonder about the quality of them plus what compromises have been made with the other components to fit the tb internal.

I’ve just purchased 2 500gb external SSDs and am looking to swap everything over to them in the next couple of weeks. Expensive? Yes at £170 each but hopefully good for a few years yet.

[Shakermaker Promotions]

I have a 2TB external HD connected to the Denon and the same connected to the laptop with VDJ. I also have the same library on the laptop which has an internal HD of 1.5TB.

The back up laptop only has 1TB but it's enough.

[yourdj]

I’ve just purchased 2 500gb external SSDs and am looking to swap everything over to them in the next couple of weeks. Expensive? Yes at £170 each but hopefully good for a few years yet.

For the sake of ease I would rather just buy a 1tb internal SSD at £250, although there are bargains to be made on new b stock premium brands. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BRAND-NEW-...QAAOSwmPdZtTf6

Or are we talking the new super slim type laptops? I only really know about Apple and like their newer products (post 2012) but refuse to go that route until cloud computing and 4g is better. I might be upgrading soon to process RAW photos, but may opt for a desktop for that as they are generally more powerful for the money.

[Imagine]

For the sake of ease I would rather just buy a 1tb internal SSD at £250, although there are bargains to be made on new b stock premium brands. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BRAND-NEW-...QAAOSwmPdZtTf6

Or are we talking the new super slim type laptops?

With the newer MacBooks, you can't physically change the internal HDD! (or the RAM either come to think of it).
Their idea is that you are forced to do anything that needs storage in the Cloud (or attach an external HDD)