# Separate hard drives for reading samples and movie projects?



## A3D2 (Mar 11, 2019)

Hi everyone,

I has not been the happiest day for me today... My 3TB HDD external hard drive (with all my homemade samples and movie projects) failed on me out of the blue. My mac says it is corrupted, but I can't seem to fix it with disk utility. Disk utility refuses to finish repairing my drive and tells me to copy all the files from the external hard drive (which I can still access and copy luckily, but I cannot change the files) and then reformat my external drive.

I used it for streaming my personal EXS sample libraries and for saving my Logic project files on it as well. I have had no problems in all those years doing this simultaneously on 1 external drive. But now I am doubting whether it is better to use a separate drive for the samples and a separate drive for my Logic projects.

What do you guys recommend? Is using 1 drive fine or are 2 separate drives better?

And do you know (if I manage to salvage all my files) how I can check which files are corrupted and which aren't? Is there any macos software for this?

I'm also a bit in a dilemma on how to proceed further because (fortunately) I backed up my entire external drive to another external drive 2 months ago but did a lot of EXS sampling work in the meantime. Would you just continue from the backup from 2 months ago? Or try to continue from the current drive's files of which some might be corrupted?

Thanks for the advice as always


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## JohnG (Mar 11, 2019)

At the risk of stating the obvious, a project drive is going to have a lot more write/erase/overwrites than a sample drive. The latter may have very few writes at all, once it's full, except for updates. Even the updates are pretty small potatoes; sample updates don't mess much or at all with the main content -- the samples -- only updating Instruments and scripting.

So for that reason alone, I would certainly keep them separate. Another reason is that it could make backing up slightly more fiddly. I back up my project files every day, whereas sample files I back up once in a while / about once a week or so. Naturally, one can back up just a folder, so maybe that's a trivial matter.

There used to be a problem writing to SSDs over and over (as one does with project files). You didn't say whether the external drive was an SSD -- guessing "no." That's another reason to keep them separate, I guess.


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## A3D2 (Mar 11, 2019)

JohnG said:


> At the risk of stating the obvious, a project drive is going to have a lot more write/erase/overwrites than a sample drive. The latter may have very few writes at all, once it's full, except for updates. Even the updates are pretty small potatoes; sample updates don't mess much or at all with the main content -- the samples -- only updating Instruments and scripting.
> 
> So for that reason alone, I would certainly keep them separate. Another reason is that it could make backing up slightly more fiddly. I back up my project files every day, whereas sample files I back up once in a while / about once a week or so. Naturally, one can back up just a folder, so maybe that's a trivial matter.
> 
> There used to be a problem writing to SSDs over and over (as one does with project files). You didn't say whether the external drive was an SSD -- guessing "no." That's another reason to keep them separate, I guess.



@JohnG Yes it was indeed a HDD not an SSD. Ok, so if I understand correctly I should buy 2 external drives. Perhaps an SSD for the samples one? And a HDD for the projects one? It will probably also increase the loading speed of the samples? Thanks for your help


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## JohnG (Mar 11, 2019)

A3D2 said:


> @JohnG Yes it was indeed a HDD not an SSD. Ok, so if I understand correctly I should buy 2 external drives. Perhaps an SSD for the samples one? And a HDD for the projects one? It will probably also increase the loading speed of the samples? Thanks for your help



I have switched over now to SSDs for almost everything except backup. For backup, one can need very large amounts of storage and besides -- it's a backup!

For sample drives, SSDs make an enormous difference to loading times and very possibly will allow you to reduce your buffers. 

This is true of any kind of SSD -- I can't tell any difference between brands, or so-called "pro" versions of Samsung SSDs. The most-est best-est SSDs are the PCIe ones, like Intel's Optane, but you don't have to spend that kind of money if you don't have it. Going from the "best" HDDs to the most ordinary SSDs will make a big difference for samples.


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## A3D2 (Mar 12, 2019)

@JohnG Thank you for the advice. Honestly I've never given much attention to my external hard drives or what difference it could make to my workflow. That's why I just used one HDD drive because it didn't seem to cause me any troubles. But I'll make sure to switch to two SSD's now, just to make sure I don't lose all my hard work in the future


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## Zero&One (Mar 12, 2019)

I've got my Logic projects on 1 drive and samples on 2 others drives. As John said, I have a job (daily) to backup the project drive and 2 other jobs for samples which I run ad hoc.
Use Carbon Copy Cloner and has saved me numerous times over 10 years


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## A3D2 (Mar 12, 2019)

James H said:


> I've got my Logic projects on 1 drive and samples on 2 others drives. As John said, I have a job (daily) to backup the project drive and 2 other jobs for samples which I run ad hoc.
> Use Carbon Copy Cloner and has saved me numerous times over 10 years


@James H thanks for the tip about Carbon Copy Cloner. Had never heard of it before, I always relied on apple's time machine before. I just bought Carbon Copy Cloner to use it with the two new external drives I ordered. Hopefully my external harddrive issues and backup fails will now be a thing of the past


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## kitekrazy (Mar 12, 2019)

You must be using a laptop otherwise streaming from an eternal drive is a no no for me. The 3.5 drives are never in a housing to cool a 3.5 hard drive efficiently.


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## jbuhler (Mar 12, 2019)

kitekrazy said:


> You must be using a laptop otherwise streaming from an eternal drive is a no no for me. The 3.5 drives are never in a housing to cool a 3.5 hard drive efficiently.


Why? I’ve never had an issue streaming from external drives. That’s been especially true with SSDs. USB3 externals have never given me trouble, at least at the size projects I run. So far I run into limitations of RAM (64GB) before I encounter any issue with streaming SSDs over USB3.


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## A3D2 (Mar 12, 2019)

My main computer is a Macbook Pro, but I also use a Mac Pro as a slave computer. I've always used external hard drives for composing. It is the first time in 16 years that an external hard drive has caused me any trouble to be honest


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## JohnG (Mar 12, 2019)

I also am using external drives with a Thunderbolt connection for my iMac. Seems to work as well as an internal drive.

Here's a little article on CNET that gives all the data. Short version is that Thunderbolt 3 is zippy. 

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/usb-type-c-thunderbolt-3-one-cable-to-connect-them-all/


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## jbuhler (Mar 12, 2019)

JohnG said:


> I also am using external drives with a Thunderbolt connection for my iMac. Seems to work as well as an internal drive.
> 
> Here's a little article on CNET that gives all the data. Short version is that Thunderbolt 3 is zippy.
> 
> https://www.cnet.com/how-to/usb-type-c-thunderbolt-3-one-cable-to-connect-them-all/


If I had a bay with more than two SSDs or the size of the SSD was large enough that I was streaming too many samples from it, I could see that TB2 or 3 would be an advantage. But USB3 has been fine for a 2TB SSD or two 1TB SSDs in a dual bay. But I really don't know because I've not yet encountered any data limit streaming from SSDs through a USB3 port.


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## dzilizzi (Mar 12, 2019)

I use external drives all the time, but never the prebuilt ones. Always make your own because, generally, the prebuilt are not usually fast enough. Unless they are SSD drives. 

Sorry about your crash. At least it is reading the drive enough to copy. I always use 2 drives, one for samples, one for projects. Okay, maybe more than 2 drives since I have a lot of samples and 2 1TB SSD drives are cheaper than one 2TB SSD drive.


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## JohnG (Mar 12, 2019)

jbuhler said:


> If I had a bay with more than two SSDs or the size of the SSD was large enough that I was streaming too many samples from it, I could see that TB2 or 3 would be an advantage. But USB3 has been fine for a 2TB SSD or two 1TB SSDs in a dual bay. But I really don't know because I've not yet encountered any data limit streaming from SSDs through a USB3 port.



I don't know that we really need Thunderbolt either. That's what the iMac came with [shrugs]. I see all these tables about this or that speed and really, what works best seems still to be a bit of trial and error.

Luckily, streaming samples has gotten far faster.


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## Fredeke (Mar 13, 2019)

A3D2 said:


> Hi everyone,
> 
> I has not been the happiest day for me today... My 3TB HDD external hard drive (with all my homemade samples and movie projects) failed on me out of the blue. My mac says it is corrupted, but I can't seem to fix it with disk utility. Disk utility refuses to finish repairing my drive and tells me to copy all the files from the external hard drive (which I can still access and copy luckily, but I cannot change the files) and then reformat my external drive.
> 
> ...


 
Two separate drives can't hurt, especially for running simultaneous disk-intensive tasks such as sample playback and video editing.
However, if two drives is all you can afford, I would dedicate one for work and the other for backup. Otherwise you'd need more drive(s) for backup.

I can't recommend a good backup tool for Mac (Time Machine has good reputation but I can't vouch for it). However, I know that Apple's tools for disk management are limited.

You should try to repair your filesystem with a Linux-based live CD/DVD. If that fails, you'll have to reformat your drive (starting by re-partitioning it too just to be safe). If it still gives you trouble after that, then throw it away - there's no worse Democles' sword than a progressively failing hard drive, and once a drive starts failing, it's on a sure slippery slope. As a matter of fact, a beforehand diagnostic of your drive (once again with a serious, professional, Linux-based live cd) might help you save time: if it finds bad sectors, throw the drive away.

Although more specialized live CDs exist, most Linux installers already contain some reliable disk tools (try out https://linuxmint.com/download.php for example). It's always a good idea to disconnect all other hard drives before this, if you can, to avoid reformatting the wrong one by mistake. Otherwise be super cautious and double-check everything.

Now if you don't have a DVD reader in your Mac, those cost about $19 (you don't need an Apple one). Or you can try making a bootable USB stick, which I always found a pain to do... but it's doable.

(One last thing, just in case: making 2 partitions on the same drive is not equivalent to having two drives. It won't make your drive any faster, and using the second partition for backup isn't recommended either, because once the drive fails, both partitions fail.)


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## A3D2 (Mar 13, 2019)

@Fredeke Thanks for all your advice!  I also have 2 backup HDD's: a 2TB and a 4TB. Unfortunately the backups on these were not 'really' recent, more about from 2 months ago. But I will definitely be able to use the 2 new SSD ones constantly for composing.

I have no experience using the Linux live CD on macos, is it difficult to use? I'm not really technical I'm afraid. Because I came across some macos 'disk repair' software like Disk Warrior and Disk Drill: do you think any of those could help me fix my faulty 3TB HDD? This software seemed pretty easy to use.

Anyway, I'll definitely make sure to copy all the files I can from the faulty drive before I attempt to fix it. Just in case it completely fails. 




Fredeke said:


> Two separate drives can't hurt, especially for running simultaneous disk-intensive tasks such as sample playback and video editing.
> However, if two drives is all you can afford, I would dedicate one for work and the other for backup. Otherwise you'd need more drive(s) for backup.
> 
> I can't recommend a good backup tool for Mac (Time Machine has good reputation but I can't vouch for it). However, I know that Apple's tools for disk management are limited.
> ...


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## Fredeke (Mar 13, 2019)

A3D2 said:


> @Fredeke Thanks for all your advice!  I also have 2 backup HDD's: a 2TB and a 4TB. Unfortunately the backups on these were not 'really' recent, more about from 2 months ago. But I will definitely be able to use the 2 new SSD ones constantly for composing.
> 
> I have no experience using the Linux live CD on macos, is it difficult to use? I'm not really technical I'm afraid. Because I came across some macos 'disk repair' software like Disk Warrior and Disk Drill: do you think any of those could help me fix my faulty 3TB HDD? This software seemed pretty easy to use.
> 
> Anyway, I'll definitely make sure to copy all the files I can from the faulty drive before I attempt to fix it. Just in case it completely fails.



Unfortunately, I don't know any util for OSX. Linux LiveCDs are straightforward to use, but they use no-nonsense technical terms, which can be offputting after Apple's relabelling of all technologies into user-friendly, yet meaningless, terms. Anyway, if you are set on formatting your drive, then you've got nothing more to loose in trying, right ?

I can tell you this: if you plan to buy SSD as a replacement, then the benefits of having two drives instead of one are not as important as with spinning drives. Other considerations should factor in, like durability: expensive SSDs last longer than cheaper ones, for given speed and capacity. (Note that durability is essentially linked to the amount of writing you do to it. You can read your SSD as much as you want without using it significantly)


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## kitekrazy (Mar 13, 2019)

jbuhler said:


> Why? I’ve never had an issue streaming from external drives. That’s been especially true with SSDs. USB3 externals have never given me trouble, at least at the size projects I run. So far I run into limitations of RAM (64GB) before I encounter any issue with streaming SSDs over USB3.



I have 6 SATA ports. I don't use an optical drive so after the OS drive I have 5 more ports to use. I haven't filled up the 4 2TB drives yet. No need for eternal drives yet, but when those 2TB SSDs get to where I can afford them, those HDDs will be externals via a HDD dock.


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## jbuhler (Mar 13, 2019)

kitekrazy said:


> I have 6 SATA ports. I don't use an optical drive so after the OS drive I have 5 more ports to use. I haven't filled up the 4 2TB drives yet. No need for eternal drives yet, but when those 2TB SSDs get to where I can afford them, those HDDs will be externals via a HDD dock.


Well, using SATA ports you have available is a different proposition from saying it’s a no no to use external drives unless working on a laptop...


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## kitekrazy (Mar 13, 2019)

jbuhler said:


> Well, using SATA ports you have available is a different proposition from saying *it’s a no no to use external drives unless working on a laptop..*.



It still is in IMO with a 3.5 HDD enclosure with constant use. The only tools I have to test drives don't recognize USB drives. I do SMART tests every week on my drives.


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## A3D2 (Apr 6, 2019)

To give a last update on my 3TB HDD failing on me: I was able to recover all the files (by copying folders manually) and they seem to be okay. I also purchased Diskwarrior which was (after reformatting) able to repair the broken external drive which is now fixed and working again. I just wanted to let you guys know that this Diskwarrior software works well if you have any external hard drive issues: it apparently also checks your external drives daily to detect and prevent future failures.  And now the Carbon Copy Cloner (as was suggested here) takes care of my daily backups. So thank you everyone for the advice!


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## Fredeke (Apr 7, 2019)

Sounds good.


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