importance of hard drive speed for macbook (pro) studio setup

[ebbandflow]

How important is hard drive speed for a studio setup? At this point when I've narrowed down that I want portability so I'm gonna go with either a macbook or a macbook pro. The 17 inch macbook pro is the only notebook that comes with a hard drive at 7200 rpm. Is this so important? Someone told me it was so I was just wondering.

I'm starting out running pro tools LE and reason with an Mbox but I may be upgrading my studio in the future.

 

[e-clipse]

It is important when working with large audio files. I use a MacBook Pro for all recording and sequencing projects. I have an 80gig 5400rpm drive and it works great under pressure. I do not run into any problems.

I would purchase a large external drive running at 7200 rpm and keep all of my recorded audio files, samples, and loops on it. Most professional engineers I have talked to recommend a firewire drive to usb 2.0, even if it is firewire 400.

Here is a link that shows benchmarks of Firewire versus USB 2.0.http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html

Unfortunately, the benchmark was done on older mac laptops.

 

[AlBDamned]

A 5400 rpm drive would be fine, but as e-clipse says, you'd be wise to get a beefier and faster external drive to run everything off when actually in the studio, as repeated and regular use with this sort of work can mean a laptop drive will fail earlier than usual, meaning a replacement drive and downtime without your computer. it's a much better idea to use the easily swappable external as your main workhorse HDD.

Also - make sure you have more than one backup. People have lost years of irreplaceable music work because of failing hard drives and then failed back up hard drives...

 

[zimv20]

you'd be wise to get a beefier and faster external drive to run everything off when actually in the studio

not sure what you mean by "everything".

E&F -- use your internal drive for osx and your audio app(s), but keep your audio files on an external drive. throughput is important, plus you don't want your hard drive head(s) skipping all over the place to read/write data, which they will do if you're reading/writing audio, plus running an audio app and all the OS services off a single drive. for the external drive, get nothing slower than 7200 rpm, and if possible get a drive w/ at least 8 meg of cache.

AIBD makes a good point about keeping backups. heck, i should do one tonight

 

[AlBDamned]

not sure what you mean by "everything".

E&F -- use your internal drive for osx and your audio app(s), but keep your audio files on an external drive. throughput is important, plus you don't want your hard drive head(s) skipping all over the place to read/write data, which they will do if you're reading/writing audio, plus running an audio app and all the OS services off a single drive. for the external drive, get nothing slower than 7200 rpm, and if possible get a drive w/ at least 8 meg of cache.

AIBD makes a good point about keeping backups. heck, i should do one tonight

Yeah the heavy file reading/writing is the main point. "Everything" was a little unclear.

 

[ebbandflow]

Ok, so even a macbook (not a pro) would be good enough for a studio? As long as I got a good external hard drive?

 

[AlBDamned]

Ok, so even a macbook (not a pro) would be good enough for a studio? As long as I got a good external hard drive?

For basic hardware requirements, a MacBook would be fine. I saw a 5-piece band on Thursday who used a MacBook live on stage for lots of their sound management. However, a MacBook Pro can take more RAM and has faster processors and a bigger screen. All useful things in your situation.

If you can afford a MBP then it would be a better bet IMO, but you might want to wait a bit for Santa Rosa

 

[ebbandflow]

Is it true that upgrades for pro tools come out six months to a year after upgrades to an OS? Is the santa rosa intel processor coming with the upgrade to leopard? If so, should I stay with tiger so I can use my protools/reason/mbox setup without having to wait for a protools upgrade?

 

[zimv20]

Is it true that upgrades for pro tools come out six months to a year after upgrades to an OS?

no, it's not that long. couple of weeks to a couple of months, i believe.