External Harddrives...

curious as to what would be the best/fastest external hd for storing all of my kontact libraries... usb 3.0 or thunderbolt? or something else.. I'm running mac os x 10.9.1 with 16gb ram.

 

More important is if the drive is a mechanical one or an SSD. SSDs are the fastest (and in fact the best choice for streaming sample libraries), but more expensive. Connection itself doesn't matter much, if at all, except Thunderbolt is more expensive than USB (for no big reason).

 

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thanks that helps me a lot. i was on LaCie's website and the largest SSD external they have is 256gb. which is too small. Can you recommend anything else that what suit me? I have roughly 350gigs of libraries. so something like a 500gb SSD would hold me over for next year or so. Ive always had awesome experience with Lacies hard drives. even my oldest ones still work like a charm, but Western Digital on the other hand, Ill never own another WD drive ever. Everyone I've owned has been nothing but problems and they always end of crapping out.

 

If you just play, just get a big drive. It's much cheaper than SSD ... more than 1000 GB for less than $100.

 

An SSD isn't *required*. I stream large quantities of data from a traditional SATA drive. I haven't upgraded myself for cost reasons (my samples drive is around 1.5TB...prohibitively expensive to put on an SSD).

An SSD will give even better performance, but let's not forget that non-SSD SATA's can still pull plenty of weight.

 

Don't know where you looked but LaCie has bigger ssd drives - 512 gig and 1 terabyte. See here: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10549

Not cheap; the 512 gig is $699 US and the larger one is $999 US. They both have dual Thunderbolt connections. The LaCie drive I'm using is this one in 4 terabyte: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10573

2 separate drives in one case with dual Thunderbolt connections. You don't say what specific Mac you have so we can't make specific recommendations because connection ports can make a difference in what we recommend. If you have FW800 ports a good drive to use is Glyph GPT50; I have a pair of those as well. One on FW800 and another on an Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter. They are fast as well but not as fast as the Thunderbolt setup and both the LaCie and Glyphs have 7200 rpm drives in them so connection protocol does make a difference.

 

For mechanical drives, protocol itself doesn't make a difference. Not all mechanical drives of the same model are 100% identical in their performance, and also another thing to note is that AFAIK both LaCie and Glyph just make cases, they do not produce their own drives - they take WDs or whatever and put them in their cases. So it is possible there are two different drives within the case. Also, FW>TB adapter likely adds a tiny bit of its own overhead when converting that can impact the performance.

 

And I'm saying protocol DOES make a difference - it does here. Both the LaCie and Glyph have 7200 rpm drives in them so that part of the equation is the same and any other differences are or would be so small as to not make the difference I'm seeing. The Thunderbolt drives throughput are two to three times faster than the FW800 Glyphs. To me that shows the FW800 protocol is throttling the throughput compared to Thunderbolt. I know they probably use WD's or other drives and they're probably different in both but drives are similar enough in a specific class that the differences are minor at best.

There's little to no difference in throughput between the Glyph GPT50 on it's own FW800 port versus the one on the Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter.

 

Interesting.

Now that I read about it, seems like USB 3 kills FW800 and even TB for mechanical hard drives...

http://nofilmschool.com/2013/05/macworld-benchmark-battle-usb-3-vs-thunderbolt/

 

True but if you look at the numbers they aren't all that much better; the difference is less than 2% so I wouldn't use the word 'kills' in relation to Thunderbolt although like I said the connection protocol does make a difference especially when FW800 is brought into the mix.

 

I'd be happy to use the word "kills" when a USB3 enclosure can be had for $20 and a Thunderbolt enclosure may cost $150! If USB3 is even in the ballpark, it has a dramatic cost advantage (not to mention convenience since it's backwards compatible).

 

Touché, David.