I've now got an insane amount of external drives (about 11 in all) of varying sizes between 500GB and 4TB. I have posted about this ages ago (probably years rather than months), but advice might be outdated by now and I couldn't actually find the previous thread.

Anyway, what is the best way for me to reduce these down into a single enclosure and connection (if possible)?

In time I will replace with 8TB drives probably, consolidating them down to less drives. On this note, Are the WD Red series (designed for 24/7 on usage for NAS) any good for audio production and storing Kontakt libraries on etc? They're only 5400rpm rather than 7200rpm, but are designed to spin slower and load up and find things quicker, as I've been led to believe, so the rpm difference shouldn't be a significant concern. Is that correct?

Any suggestions on a workable solution? And the cheaper the better as I've no real spare cash due to the amount of electricity all these external drives are using up!

Cheers all!

 

Do a quick test with any tool that let's you measure velocity and access time. AIDA64 or any other hard drive tester.

 

Excuse me, but this is complete and utter bullshit. Spinning slower means it takes longer to get to the point you need to go to.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital:

Nothing at all about speed, in fact they're not talking about speed but reliability and energy efficiency. Wonder what they had to sacrifice?

Also there:

For audio stuff I'd go with Black, or Blue if you're on a budget. Red could be good for backups

EDIT: not to mention NAS is anything but "24/7 on usage"

 

Also look at the ST Ironwolf series. 4TB is 5k9

Should be tolerable. I'd rather drives that last longer, less heat/energy.

 

WD Blue here, pretty good.

 

NAS drives are designed for 24/7 operation, which primarily means less boots, and constant usage or at least spinning,
lower rotational speeds are because of less heat and lower requirements for data rates, since NAS is primarily targeted as storage,
I have four 4TB IronWolf drives in my NAS and it works perfect, transfers speeds are bottlenecked by 1Gbit wired network,
you may check some NAS models offering nvme SSD caching, read and/or write (Synology DS918+ for ex.),

depending on what you have on these drives,
if those are "backups" you need to access no more than once a year, then it would be more reliable not to have them plugged them anywhere, and spin them up only when needed,
on the other hand if you have some frequently used kontakt libraries, you might just buy an external SSD (something like Samsung T5 series),
NAS is great for storing things you need to access at least once a month or week, be it documents, exported projects, audio sample database etc..

 

How is "documents, exported projects, sample database etc.." 24/7 operation? That kind of stuff should only spin up when you need that specific document or export

 

I kinda stuck 2 6TB drives (already had) and 1 12TB drive into an old desktop & used it as a kinda media / sample lib thingy. I mainly use HD as bak nao, just try to squeeze Kontakt libs onto SSD. It's prolly all the storage I'll rly need, nao streaming is a thing. It doesn't cost too much to get a 12TB drive if ur patient. I think you can get a 12TB purple (7200) for $400, maybe shop around. And then use the lil old leftover (11?) drives as offsite backups. Save up for black friday?

Not really! I'd try to get used to using SSD for sample libs, if possible? It really makes a difference.

 

Last edited: Aug 6, 2018