r/musicproduction • u/amethyst353 • 19h ago

Hardware Which hard drive should I get?

I'm new to music production, and don't know anything about hard drives. I only have 5 songs so far but I realized quickly that storing the WAV files as well as the daw projects onto my laptop isn't a good idea. It's going to take up a lot of space

So I need to buy a hard drive but I don't even understand the different sizes. I don't know how to comprehend the differences in gigabyte and terabyte even.

I use a gaming laptop because that's what I have, and it works just fine so far. Only one of my USB inputs work though so I use a USB hub is that okay to plug an external hard drive into?

I feel really dumb asking these questions but I really don't know. So please be kind. Also by budget is less than $100 so there's that too

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

2

u/LetterheadClassic306 16h ago

For music projects, honestly, I would skip old-school external hard drives for now and get a 1TB portable SSD. When I hit this same storage issue, 1TB was the point where it stopped feeling cramped without getting expensive. The Samsung T7 1TB Portable SSD is a solid fit under that kind of budget if the price is behaving, and it is plenty fast for WAVs and DAW project folders. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, so it is a lot more breathing room than a 256GB or 512GB drive. Using it through a USB hub can work, but plug the drive into the best USB port on the hub and avoid piling a bunch of other devices on it while recording.

2

u/Zestyclose_Pickle511 14h ago

One thing you learn quickly is that audio, even as large as wave files are, is  peanuts in size compared to video work. You won't need to go too crazy. 

1

u/xxFT13xx 1h ago

Upgrade the drive in the laptop instead. Bump it up to 1Tb. External drives are meant for simply backing up info/files and should be used as such.