Hard Drive Recommendations

Hard Drive Recommendations

If you are planning a recording project, it's a good idea to purchase a drive to store it on. The studio has lots of drive space, and we can easily store several concurrent album projects, but in the end you'll want to have a drive of your own to store it on. In general, you want a 7200 r.p.m. Firewire drive that is somewhere between 250 and 500 gigabytes. USB-only drives are not recommended, and SATA-only drives cannot be connected to our system. Either Firewire 400 or 800 will work. Do not purchase a raid system as it cannot be used with Pro Tools.

The drive should be for the exclusive use of your recording project, and should be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) using the Disk Utility found in the Utilies folder on any modern Macintosh. If you bring your drive to us directly from the store, we will format it for you. If you want to use your session on a Windows machine running Pro Tools, you may format the drive using FAT32. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should the drive be formatted using NTFS, as we will not be able to write to the drive. Note that if your drive is formatted FAT32, we will record the session using our drives and transfer the session to your drive.

Our favorite drives for recording work are made by Glyph Technologies. They are a bit more expensive than most drives, but they are very well built and extremely reliable and have the best warranty of any drive manufactured today. Your recording is a precious investment of time, money and artistic resources - why entrust it to a cheap drive? A great resource for drives in New York is TekServe on 23rd Street.