hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well today's video we're going
to be breaking down my external hard drive setup as well as some tips for you guys to maximize
efficiency and performance in the daw with your sessions with your plugins also going
to talk about some storage and backup tips which we don't talk about enough
but it's incredibly important to create this redundancy in your studio environment i'm
going to show you the cloud storage service that i've been utilizing for a long time that
creates more redundancy beyond just these physical drives i'm also going to give you guys some buyers
tips in terms of what i would recommend for external hard drives let's go and dive in
all right so let's talk about my external hard drive setup i've been utilizing this same setup
for a very long time the only thing that's changed is i just recently switched to all solid state
drives we'll talk about why i made that switch here in a little bit but let's just talk about
the three specific drives that i have here these are all the same model which is a g drive mobile
ssd this is not a sponsored video i'm just going to tell you what's worked for me g drives have
been very reliable and consistent for me i still have spinning physical drives that i use for you
know extra session backups that are still running that i bought you know seven or eight years ago
i have uh two two terabyte mobile ssds these are usb 3.1 and one is a content drive or what i
call my working drive which is what's going to be loading all the session files all the audio files
all of the audio and sound content for you know various instruments everything except for the
software itself is going to be stored here then i have a duplicate it's the same model
of this drive 2 terabyte and this is just a backup of my content or my working drive it's always good
to have a duplicate or a clone of all of your content if this ever goes down then i know it's
all here and i back this up daily to keep it consistent and i am very conscientious about
how i organize the file structure the folders the naming but what that also allows me to do
is it makes it easy to at the end of the day just make sure and create consistency by dragging over
you know sessions i worked on that day or you know maybe i added some new sounds to a library
it's easy just to drag and drop now there are some automated solutions for cloning drives
i've tried them in the past with decent results it's up to you i personally find it you know very
easy to just spend a couple of minutes at the end of the workday and just drag over whatever folders
that i have been working on now the third drive is a one terabyte again same model as
these two terabytes but just half the size and i utilize this for time machine specifically
in osx so those of you who are mac users time machine is a great utility that will back up
the entire hard drive in your computer all the system files all the os files all your plugins
your software it will basically create a working copy on a hard drive so if anything ever happened
to your internal drive which that has happened to me i have had internal drives on my laptops
and my computers die and when they do this time machine backup becomes absolutely indispensable
it's very easy to back up an entire machine to the exact working specs so obviously you know having
redundant physical drives is great but you also want to have something that's off-site or quote
in the cloud so i utilize a cloud service called crashplan for small business and this is by a
company called code42 once again not a sponsored video i've just been utilizing this service with
good results for a while but this has some cool features about it you know number one you can
be very specific about the drives as well as the specific folders and files that you want
to back up so for me what i do is i back up from my two terabyte backup drive right so that leaves
the working drive free to do whatever it is i'm working on no matter when this backup to the cloud
is running that two terabyte backup drive is there to provide the backup to the cloud i also back up
some files and folders from the internal on my laptop the other cool thing about crashplan
is that you can set up a schedule and so i have it set up to run every day of the week and it
will start a backup at 11 and run to 7am however long it needs to go to create a full backup if
i'm still working during those hours it will pause and then i can just start it whenever i'm finished
and it will continue to you know utilize those hours to do backups at the beginning of each
backup it will you know calculate what has changed on your drive automatically you don't have to
you know reselect any files it automatically makes sure that all that stuff is consistent
in between backups so as far as my recommendations for those of you in the market for external drives
obviously i would recommend solid state drives they are more expensive than the physical spinning
drives but they're a lot faster they have better performance and for me a really important thing
about those is that they're silent so before i had these i had again the same setup but with physical
spinning drives and these are the bigger g-drives that have fans and they're really loud so those
of you who ask why i utilize a noise gate on my vocals for so many years a big reason is because
of those loud drives if you can't afford solid state drives it's okay you can still utilize these
physical spinning drives this is a one terabyte mobile usb g drive usb 3.0 this is going to be a
lot more cost efficient and you can still get good results with it important thing to note before you
start buying hard drives is to make sure and take into account what type of connections you have
on your laptop or on a hub that you might be utilizing in your system so for me i have
thunderbolt 3 thankfully on my laptop very fast connection and i can connect these drives via usb
3.1 either through those on the laptop or on my hub now i want to just point out that on the hub i
have noticed that i get different speeds depending on which port i plug it into so the specs on that
hub vary depending on where you plug this in and if you all are using you know low quality
unpowered hubs you're going to find that the speed that you're getting even on really fast drives
like these ssds is not going to be where it could be something i would recommend for you all to do
to check the performance of the connection you have for your hard drive is to try out a utility
like blackmagic speed test and this will allow you to measure the read and write speeds for
your drive so just experimenting and figuring out which of those connections was the fastest
actually doubled my read and write speeds on my working drive so highly recommend doing that and
figuring out what's the best for your setup you know as far as size again having two two terabyte
working drives for me is plenty you know i have a lot of sessions a lot of different uh sound and
audio files for the different instruments i use so for most of you out there that's going to be
way more than enough and then just having the one terabyte for the time machine is plenty because
i'm keeping all that content off of the internal so what's actually on my laptop hard drive is not
that much it's pretty minimal and one you know full time machine backup is about 250 to 300 gigs
all right y'all so that is my external hard drive setup for storage as well as backup in addition
to the cloud service i know that many of you might have different preferences than me but i hope this
gives you an idea of how you can implement these into your workflow to give you the best efficiency
the best performance and also peace of mind to have that redundancy in all of these files that
you work so hard for in the studio if you have any questions or comments about external hard
drives as well as the cloud service we covered feel free to leave a comment below if you learn
anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing we'll talk to you soon