External Hard Drives and Your DAW

Hey guys! By request, I'm sharing my external hard drive setup / thoughts for mixing and production work.

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[humanambassador]

please please please can you make a video telling the steps how to move sample libraries from your mac to the hard drive and work efficiently​

[fenderbender]

Sean. Honestly. I think you have some of the best videos that I have seen on youtube for everything related to music production and its ins and outs. Literally everything that I have looked up because I need quality information to help with my production, it's always your videos that pop up or somehow end up on your page with perfect and effective advice or how to's. To me your channel is the go to on these things from now on and I hope YouTube, the community here and producers alike continue to recognize you for your time and efforts. Hope you read this is you ever get down or anything, you are definitely making an impact. Thank you man.

[TheKnightimeProject]

Thanks for sharing Sean! Can't stress enough the importance of creating a system backup - I had a major 'incident' on Monday and had to restore my primary drive - I backup daily so was able to get back up and running in a couple hours or so. Information doesn't exist unless it's in more than one place. Keep'em coming bud!

[TrayLittle]

Thank you for this! I had a hard drive that crashed and I lost so much stuff

[djgeorgieporgie]

I have been cloning my hard drive for 5 years now. If you work with music is a must.

[tonyd]

I got two externals one with my libraries and projects and the second with a Time Machine backup of the internal and the external.

[justuswilson]

I've bee having computer crashing issues and problems with my DAW a lot recently, and I believe this could help! I haven't tried saving stuff on external drives and I have an 2012 iMac that's starting to move really slow, especially because I have a lot of sessions and projects that I'm recording, mixing, etc... Thank you for making this video!

[VintiqueSound]

Great video. Especially important to backup and to use multiple drives for improved performance.

Just for further clarification, it's not the fact that you have "external" drives that make it faster, it's the fact that your session and media data are stored on a separate drive than the OS & DAW/plugins software. So you can have an internal SSD for your OS & DAW & plugins, then an internal SSD or Hard Drive for all your session files. The "external" factor doesn't add any performance benefits. I go a step further and keep all of my sample library content (NI Komplete Ultimate, Steinberg VST sound library, etc.) on a 3rd drive so that reading the library content doesn't bog the system down.

[TheRabbit]

Its the same setup I have on my system. I have a backup SSD external for Software and libraries. I have another SSD for songs and projects. This is a good approach to handling files and software.

[BengtSkogvall]

Very good video and very good way to organize your data! One addition I would suggest would be to do backups of (one) of the external drives like once a day to a third drive. Having two copies of everything, as you do, is a great way to protect your data. Having a third copy is even better. Imagine the situation that when the primary drive fails and you see it at first when the data is backuped or synchronized to the second drive. Then you have corrupted also your second drive. Hence the need for a third drive. If your external drives are set up as RAID 1, that would of course not occur and you would be notified when a drive failure is detected. The other drive would still function and you would not loose any data. Using RAID 1 also means that if you accidentally delete something, that data is immediately deleted on the second external drive as well. Also in this case, a third drive would save your day. I would do the backup to the third drive like once a day and store it outside of your studio. That way you would not loose any data even if your studio burns in the night.

[marvinhampton]

Thanks it really helps me I'm an amateur beat Maker I know I'm getting something big for this for Christmas 😎

[DollaSignGang]

Hey Sean if I'm not asking too much can u do a video and show us how to transfer all files to the external hard drive and run the logic software off ur external hard drive 🙌🏾

[sonora]

great advice, Sean! I will be updating my OS in the near future to take once again advantage of the RAID configuration using two USB 3 HDDs.

[noelkinz]

Can you run Vsts on the actual external hard Drive?

[swackymusic]

I maintain a drive for projects audio sample library backup, one usb for VST’s to not put them VST’s somewhere lost within program files, and all I want is the option to install ableton on external drives or a usb C drive for complete reliability

[ReynaldoIvanPena]

I’m curious to know if it’s worth it to have one drive for audio and one drive for video. In terms of performance.

[ericwilliamson]

Fucking thank you. I’ve literally been looking for a simple explanation like this for months. Nicely tied together all the bits of knowledge vomit I’ve collected over the web without trying to sound like you have a computer IQ of 3000 in the process.

[Sangarang]

Great tips man! Just started using my Samsung EVO 850 SSD as an external drive and it's been killer!

[mikeechols]

Great tips! Especially the SSD comments 👊🏽

[bikesnbeerz]

Just bought the Diamond bundle and your templates - Keep being good brotha.