Hard drive for Logic: 5400 or 7200

jeffy.dee-lux said:

This topic seems to come up pretty often, but usually in the context of another thread.
I'm just getting started with Logic, recording at most 2 tracks at a time through a firewire interface. Will probably end up working on projects with at most a dozen tracks or so, some of them MIDI but mostly recorded audio.

I've been looking for an external drive on which to record my projects. I'm looking at 500GB drives, both of them have FW800 (wouldn't need to daisy chain with my FW interface), one is a desktop drive at 7200rpm, the other is a bus powered drive at 5400rpm. Bus powered is attractive to me, reducing clutter on a crowded work space (one less plug!) and the portability is also attractive.

Is it a bad call to go with a 5400rpm drive though? I'm guessing the speed of FW800 is bottle necked when it hits the drive itself.

The drives in question are a Western Digital Passport (portable, 5400rpm, FW800) and a Seagate Freeagent Desktop (7200rpm, fw800). Both 500gb, both about the same price.

Thanks for your input!

Click to expand...

RPM does not mean a lot. It says as much about drive performance as the RPM gauge on your car does about the car's speed. Yes it related to performance but not the whole story.

For audio what you care more about is the "sustained" I/O rate that the drive can handle. The bottle neck is determined by the number of bits packed in one concentric track multiplied by the time it takes to make one revolution. (more technically as aerial bit density times tangential velocity.) Higher bit density does as much for speed as RPM. In fact over the decades RPM has gone up very little (It was 3,600 RPM in the 1970's) but density as moved up by orders of magnitude.

That said, If you care about performance you don't want any of the little notebook sized disks. Get a full sized drive and almost all of those are 7200 rpm. These are cheap. the 1TB size is only $100. Don't bother with 500GB it is not worth the $20 lower price.

But if you work out what you really need, it's not much if you are only recording a few tracks.

One more thing, buy several of the drives, you will need a few of them for backups.

Whats your machine?

Why not use the internal, since your demands are very little and then just get an external for pure back up / storage?

With regards the rpm of drives, as said above its not the most critical thing, but you should go for the 7200 if you can affod to. The 5400 should be fine for low track numbers and editing etc....

Personally I wouldnt touch a 5400, but then again I do quite a lot of heavy tracking