Your DJ - Mobile DJ The New Forest, Southampton & Hampshire. Toby
https://yourdj.co.uk/
You know that pretty much all hard drives are the the same physical dimensions, right? The HDD in your laptop is most likely a 2.5" unit (unless it's a newer Mac where the storage is soldered to the motherboard) and the external SSD's you bought are probably exactly the same...
The last few laptops I've bought have come with 160Gb or 250Gb HDD's and I've switched them out to 1TB hybrid drives which are dirt cheap (£60) and give the performance benefits of an SSD with the capacity and price of a drive with spinning platters. Hybrid drives never really took off because SSD's got cheap around the same time. Basically they have a 16Gb or 32Gb of solid state storage (SSD basically) coupled with a 1TB traditional drive and the drive basically caches the frequently used data on the SSD (so the operating system, program files, frequently used data, etc all come off the SSD and the remainder - usually music and video in my case - is read from the physical disk). Takes about 5mins to pysically swap the disk and about an hour to clone the original hard disk onto the new one and does fine as long as you're not using the machine to render video (or any other hugely disk intensive applications).
If anyone wants any 160Gb hard drives, I have a few spare...
Julian
http://www.bristoldiscohire.co.uk - Quality Disco and Equipment hire for Bristol & Bath
Weddings, Birthday Parties, Kids Parties, School Disco's and more
https://julianburr.co.uk - Wedding, Family, Portrait and Product Photography
Thats kind of along the lines of my thinking. I have several 'external drives' that i have taken apart and use a caddy for USB. They also slot nicely into the mac when using new machines etc. Works great as a back up drive if you need to replace an HDD. Not such an issue now I have gone SSD though, the EVO's are solid!
I must have got through 15 MacBooks now, probably more as I have been using them for 13 years now.
Your DJ - Mobile DJ The New Forest, Southampton & Hampshire. Toby
https://yourdj.co.uk/
I prefer internal drive. Saves carting around extra drive and cable.
Also no danger of drive cable getting pulled out half way through a track.
1tb internal on play out laptop , but only 500gb on backup , but that is plenty for me
Daryll
darylldj.co.uk , serving hampshire , Surrey and sussex
MacBook with 512gb internal SSD and Windows laptop with the same.
Both carry the same DJ software and the same copy of iTunes through iTunes Match.
Thats the first thing I thought of. Drives are the same dimensions regardless of their capacity (how much data they can hold).
The other thing about external drives is they are more likely to take more knocks and physical punishment than internal drives because we treat our laptops with the utmost respect but people seem to think nothing of chucking external drives around.
I've noticed that 1Tb internal drives have been mentioned but this isn't a limit. The internal drive in my Asus is 1.5Tb which I split up in to 3 separate virtual drives. It works a treat and is quite fast. The whole laptop (Intel Core i3 processor with 4Gb RAM and the 1.5Tb drive) was a complete bargain at just over £500. I don't think I'll find a deal that good again! It's never wobbled running VDJ and, when I return to DJing, it will still be my star piece of kit!
Dazzy D
Lightning Disco & Entertainment
Born to make you party!
I've just got a standard spinning disk 500gb internal on my main laptop. More than enough for just DJing.
I have a super quick SSD on my desktop but for DJing I'm not sure there is any massive advantage.
Always internal though, I don't want one more cable to go wrong or one more thing to set up.
♦ Dorset DJ - Dorset based DJ service
♦ 11:11 EVENTS LTD - 11:11 EVENTS LTD
Internal for me.
I don't want another cable (my controller, dmx and mouse use up the 3 USB ports I have) and I don't want a USB hub.
It's another thing that can be forgotten and another thing to go wrong.
http://www.bristoldiscohire.co.uk - Quality Disco and Equipment hire for Bristol & Bath
Weddings, Birthday Parties, Kids Parties, School Disco's and more
https://julianburr.co.uk - Wedding, Family, Portrait and Product Photography