External SSD Drive for Audio Recording?
Should you use an External SSD Drive for Audio Recording? Hard drives have come a long way and are pretty cheap compared to a couple of years ago. You can now get super fast external SSD drives for audio recording, video editing and for storing your sample libraries on for the price of a pair of jeans and a shirt.
Sample libraries such as Native Instruments Kontakt can be pretty huge. Standard HDD drives don’t load the patches which can sometimes be a gigabyte or two, fast enough. Using an SSD for sample library storage can massively reduce load times and speed up your workflow.
The same goes for your DAW sessions. I run some pretty huge sessions in Ableton Live and was often getting the disk overload warning. The HDD was just not loading the data quick enough, and aside from the worry in the back of your mind that this means your hard drive might fail, it’s also visually off-putting creating a distraction from what you’re doing.
So, I bought a 500GB Samsung T5 after reading online reviews about which is the best drive to get. It came with a USB C to USB C cable and a USB C to USB A cable. It’s pretty small – you can easily put it in your pocket and take your sessions to another studio and it boasts speeds of up to 540 MB/sec. My session and sample library load times are near instant now and I no longer get the disk overload warning. Phew!
A word about using a T5 with a Mac
If you intend to use a Samsung T5 with an Apple Mac computer don’t bother with the software that comes with it, just format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and you’re good to go. I now use my old HDD as a back up drive for the T5. You can format the T5 to APFS. Disk utility hides some devices by default so make sure you choose show all devices and change the partition map to GUID. I don’t have any experience of using this drive with a PC but from what I’ve read there doesn’t seem to be any issues.
Are you using an External SSD Drive for Audio Recording? Let’s hear about your experiences with recording audio to an SSD drive. Leave a comment!