Anmelden:     

Forum: General Discussion

Topic: External Hard Drives vs C drive

Dieses Thema ist veraltet und kann veraltete oder falsche Informationen enthalten.

Hi Folks. I just bought myself a new lappy and was wondering if it is better to throw all my audio and video files onto an external hardrive and leave my internal C drive empty?? I have a dj friend who only puts his tunes on an external hardrive and said his system runs great. Any advice would be appreciated.
Thx Folks
 
geposted Wed 27 Feb 13 @ 6:22 am
There are SEVERAL reasons why I would always recommend to use an external drive, but I don't have the time right now to analyze them.
However here are a few reasons: Portability, Less heat issues, Easier to backup/Clone, No damage/data loss in case you need to format your system or in case your system crashes, e.t.c.
Please keep in mind that you only read a few MB from your hard drive each time you load a song and thus you don't need ULTRA FAST speeds for your media files. And once VDJ loads a song, it loads it on RAM and it doesn't keep reading from your drive until you load the next song e.t.c.
 
Thanks for the quick response.
 
Or you could always pull your optical drive and replace it with a 1tb using a harddrive caddy. I for one never use my CDs/DVD drive so it's not a big lose to me plus I don't worry about forgetting it cause it's in my laptop and I don't have to worry about dropping it cause again it's in my laptop.
 
I agree with Huey (beatbreaker). I'd much rather have my songs stored inside the same computer. Saves messing about with connections, power supplies and so on. When you take your computer, you know you've got everything with you.

I do have external drives, but I use them as backups (and backups of the backups) rather than main storage.
 
I agree. External drives were popular when 2.5" internal drives in laptops lacked capacity.

I use the internal drive for all my music and that is backed up to an external drive with SyncToy and also kept on Skydrive.

If you only have an internal SSD and no drive bay for an extra mechanical drive then it's necessary, however I can't see the point of using one nowadays for your main music/video storage.

If the internal drive fails then there's no advantage having your collection externally.

Keith
 
Just curious,

Did your new laptop come with a USB 3.0 port ?
 
My best solution using internal hard drive:

eg: 1tb internal hd
1: partition the drive in 2 areas (for the os & for file storage)
2: make c: about 100gb (then the balance 900gb for the music / video files)
3: name the other drive ( lets call it "M:")

in the event your os crashes, M: will still be intact with same music / video files

to be on a safer side
4: copy M: to a ext hard drive (all files including the vdjdatabase)
this can be used as a backup vdj drive if your computer is stolen or you wanna play on a different machine with the ext hd.

***but just remember to rename the ext drive as "M:" same as the internal storage partion)
 
A few reasons here for why I think an External is the way to go;
1. An external HD is mobile & can be taken anywhere for when you have a gig on a system other than your own.
2. An external HD lets your OS perform smooth without any lag from the large files associated with music & videos
3. An external HD allows you to be more versatile when sorting your music & videos

Just my 2 cents
 
Don Moir wrote :
Just curious,

Did your new laptop come with a USB 3.0 port ?


Yes it can with 2 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0
 
Ok.
I will try to analyze my point of view a little bit further since this seems an interesting topic!

First of all ANY hard disk drive besides SSD will omit heat when it's working. And the more time it works the more heat it produces. We as dj's don't want to power down our disks (use power saving / speed down our HDD's) because this produces lags when we load tracks or suddenly try to browse a large folder. I'm pretty sure that we don't want this heat to stay inside our laptops especially when most club booths can get really hot and the air ventilation of our equipment is usually poor in such places. Heat can cause several "unwanted" side-effects. Heat can even cause sound issues on some occasions.
Besides the heat, an external drive is portable and more easy to manage. You can take your external disk to your desktop computer, copy the new files you've downloaded, tag them, sort them in folders, analyze them, e.t.c and then you can take the drive back to your laptop and be ready to gig.
With an internal drive most of these operations have to done on the laptop itself. This means more uptime for your laptop and more fatigue for the entire system. Remember that "DJ" laptops are working on a demanding enviroment. Besides the heat of the hard drive itself you don't want your system fans to run on 100% for an hour or so because you've decided to analyze/re-analyze 2000 tracks!
Syncing the internal media drive with an external drive is a good solution to avoid most of the fatigue of the system as mentioned above. However it just adds another "step" on the process.
An internal drive is "bound" with the laptop itself. If your laptop goes down for what ever reason, and you have to use your backup system you can't just pull the drive out and connect it on the backup. You either have to make sure that your backup system's media library is "up-to-date" with your main system, or use a second "backup" external hard drive that also has to be up to date with your main media library drive.
Also if you use two laptops (main/backup) and the hard drive fails (not the entire system) you have to completely unplug your main system and use the backup. This procedure will take some time. Connecting/Switching an external drive in case it fails doesn't take more than a few seconds.
Also backing up / cloning an external drive is far more easier and as mentioned above it can be done on another system!
Finally, partitioning a drive will isolate it's two partitions and will protect you not to lose your files in case you have to format or restore your laptop back to it's original state. However partitioning a drive for "DJ-ing" is not a good practice. You have a SINGLE drive that acts as two drives. The moving heads of your ONE PHYSICAL drive move constantly back and forth between the two partitions trying to serve both the system drive (OS drive) and your media drive. Imagine how much more fatigue and stress you put on your hard drive's moving heads when it tries to read a 150MB Video clip at the same time that the OS tries to write this data to the pagefile. And besides fatigue, this is a good way to have hard pagefault hits that will eventually result an audio drop/crackle/stutter. In fact hard pagefault hits have far more effect on a system's latency than the DPC procedures themselves! Also partitioning a drive will not rescue you from a drive failure, but you should always keep backup of your files. It's just the time you need to restore your system to its original state that increases dramatically.

I hope this info helps and that I managed to explain it the way I meant. Language IS a barrier for me on such explanatory posts!
Thanks!
 
Since 1999 I have used probably 5 or 6 laptops (with everything internally) and never had an issue with heat. I generally use Sony machines but I believe the Macbooks can be used for cooking burgers though!

Heat issues generally depend on the hard drive, graphics card and also how efficient the fan/cooling system is.

Keith
 
The bottom line....whatever way you choose (internal or external) backup your files.
The more you load or download new files, backup, backup, backup.
 
As the saying goes, it's swings and roundabouts.

Each method has its benefits and each has flaws. Nothing's perfect.

As the other saying goes, you pays your money and you takes your choice.



Phantom, you've got nothing to worry about with your language skills. That was better than some people who only speak English!
 
hey thanks Phantom for taking the time to post your comments. Very knowledgable. Thanks again !!!!
 
I'm lucky that my lappy has two hard drive bays so made sure I loaded both the 1Tb drives. All music, video and karaoke now onboard - and I still have my optical drive ;-)

Everything is backed up to external drives however so I can still be portable. Always export the VDJ database on any backup so the drive works exactly like my internal drive.

Like Kieth, I have my stuff backed up online too. I used Dropbox and moved my Virtual DJ folder in to dropbox so that is always sync'd.

I used to use external drives, but for me it was often difficult to get space/power in the booth, and if you have ever worked in venues with sound limiters, external drives can be an issue.

As has been said it's swings and roundabouts... I have made sure I can work either way but for 99.9% of the time I work with internal drives these days.

Cheers,

Roy
 


(Alte Themen und Foren werden automatisch geschlossen)