Choosing the Best External Hard Drive for Your Home Studio

Join Mitch Gallagher for a crash course in choosing the best external hard drive for your home studio or your mobile production system. After the video, click the link above to explore external hard drives at Sweetwater!

#Sweetwater

[sweetwater]

Storage devices are easy to overlook but critical to keeping your projects going! Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more ways to keep your studio at its best!

[rendermanpro]

Long story short - SSD as working drive and HDD for backup.
"I use mac mini, and there is no way to upgrade", that is funny, as well that as mac user recommended kind of non usual brands.
Good overview though, I like that Sweetwater are making those king of videos.

[BJ-fjjw]

Gratitude and respect goes out to you, Sir, for sharing your recording studio expertise. Most of us wouldn't even know what questions to ask, let alone have the awareness of alternative solutions to problems we'll encounter in the future. Thanks for your helpful guidance and recommendations!

[umbra]

man i came looking for a hard drive to buy and i left with everything i will ever need to know about storage in music production. love this kinda videos.

[brushstroke]

Thank you! As a beginner at recording music and making videos, this video was a lot more helpful than I expected! Thank you for explaining how you use multiple drives for different purposes! Sounds like I may want to start with a RAID drive to securely archive finished projects first, then expand as needed and as my financial situation allows.

[sumithramachandranwatchyou]

Excellent!! Very informative, 🙏 In fact right now I’m transferring my Hollywood strings library to SSD

[HuttyTheKid]

By you saying you use one of your SSD for virtual instruments, does that mean it is efficient to run and operate 3rd party plugins through this drive?

[dreamcometrue]

This was extremely helpful! Relevant, professional, and concise. Thanks for sharing.💯

[carlosserrano]

If you have a studio as a business get a NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a peace of mind and you have total control of your stuff and you can have for example 2 drives for your work and 2 for backup and you can have access to them anywhere in the world, just need internet.

[mproductions_]

this was great man gave me all the info i needed thank you

[tatertotter]

Mitch gallagher could tell me i need to buy a brand new computer for every single new song i want to record and i'd fuckin do it

[Scott__C]

Glad they mention backups, but you should backup all data, not just session data. I would never call a RAID a backup. RAID systems are made for either speed of accessing data or high availability. If a drive fails in some RAID systems, you can still access the data, but not a RAID 0. Also worth looking into would be an offsite backup. I personally use Backblaze and it works pretty well.

[BPMusic]

I’m just in the market for a external Hard drive. Thanks for the video Mitch

[Tommyvon]

Overall a great video but you left out one very important piece. All those backup methods have one fatal flaw. They are all in the same location. Doesn't matter how much you move them around in RAIDs or other drives. They are all still located in the same location and vulnerable to theft, or other accidents. I dont bother with anything other than an online cloud backup solution. Every night a service on my computer automatically backs up my external to the cloud. Its cheap and fool proof - its a scheduled task that will always run and i can recover wherever i am.

[ger]

Very clear, informative and super helpful. Thanks!

[tim-hill]

I have a Mac Mini. You can upgrade the drive depending on the production year. I just bought one on ebay last year and switched out the HD with a much larger capacity SSD.

[kevingriffin]

Good timing as i'm looking for this exact info. Thanks for taking the time to produce and share this!

[TheMovement]

wish you would've showed the raid drives of choice as you did the other drives

[ano]

Happy new year sweetwater and all. Sweetwater is the best one place for everything i need.

[CJ-uypw]

Hi Mitch. Are you saying that you don’t use your thundrbolt/USB C for you external drives? You seem to be using USB-3 ‘s . Are they fast enough? I have a Macmini M1 too. I need my 2 thunderbolt connections for my audio interface and my screen mirroring dongle. Is it possible to use the remaining USB-3 inputs for streaming/storing logic projects, Kontact libraries and other third party samplers?