External hard drive for Mini music

[sean barry]

I am considering an external hard drive for recording live bands. I have a 2000 Mini 2.3 i7, 16 gig memory and the stock 5400 HD. I also have a Presonus FireStudio Mobile and will be getting a Mackie 1640i. So recording up to 16 tracks (with firewire) what HD would work for 4 hours of live recording? As well as be plenty fast enough?

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack

I am thinking of one of these as it will fit with the Mini on a 1 rack space rack drawer.

 

[ChrisA]

I am considering an external hard drive for recording live bands. I have a 2000 Mini 2.3 i7, 16 gig memory and the stock 5400 HD. I also have a Presonus FireStudio Mobile and will be getting a Mackie 1640i. So recording up to 16 tracks (with firewire) what HD would work for 4 hours of live recording? As well as be plenty fast enough?

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack

I am thinking of one of these as it will fit with the Mini on a 1 rack space rack drawer.

Let's assume you record 24-bits at 96K sample per second. that is about 300K bytes per second. 16 channels of that is 4.8 mega bytes per second. four hours adds up to 72 gigabytes.

Any cheap drive you can find will do this. That said, be sure and also cary a few spares and backup drives. Buy THREE of whatever you do buy.

While you don't need the performance I'd seriously concider a FLASH based solid state drive for moble recording because they are so reliable. no moving parts. and you want to do a backup and they are FAST so your backups only take a few minutes.

As for recording, the requirements don't even stress 10 year old technology.

 

[bwhli]

I am considering an external hard drive for recording live bands. I have a 2000 Mini 2.3 i7, 16 gig memory and the stock 5400 HD. I also have a Presonus FireStudio Mobile and will be getting a Mackie 1640i. So recording up to 16 tracks (with firewire) what HD would work for 4 hours of live recording? As well as be plenty fast enough?

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ministack

I am thinking of one of these as it will fit with the Mini on a 1 rack space rack drawer.

The standard for audio recording is 7200 RPM. I've had good success with these drives along with OWC enclosure kits.