Best external hard drive for club gigs?
What are some of your favourite/recommended external hard drives to bring to club gigs?
i for my self heard only good things about the lacie rugged series (LaCie Storage Solutions: External Hard Drives, SSDs, and RAID Systems | Seagate US), but i don´t own one. i use some western digital passports. i´m using them for over 5 years and they never let me down.
+1 Lacie rugged
+1 for Western Digital.
I don’t use one for DJing but the “customer care” is really nice with them.
Upgrade your internal or add a secondary internal for gigging 
The less crap to hook up and get unplugged the better
Couldn’t agree with Xone more, I think there’s an article on the front page on how to replace your cd drive with a hard drive
Western Digital 1 tb with the WD rugged case FTW
Totally agree with this - there is no way I would do a club gig with an external hard-drive supplying the music, just seems too risky.
+1 its too unreliable, I have done it for a few gigs but on tender hooks I prefer my USB bandwidth be dedicated to controller+soundcard.
I do however bring a Maxtor Caddy with a Clone of my OS and Music on it “just in case” … worst case scenario I can borrow a Mac from somewhere if mine goes down, boot from it and be up and running 100% in no-time.
And replacing your CD drive is Deffo a great option if you don’t use it much.
Either replacing internal or Lacie Rugged…I have a Lacie Rugged 1TB and I love it!
Out of curiosity what software did you use to clone it?
carbon copy cloner is great! not sure if it works on windows but I know it works on Mac, bought an external today and put a bootable version of 10.6.8 on it incase my system hits the shit and I need to troubleshoot it.
Yep I use Carbon Copy Clone.
second internal… i had problems twice in a month before but nothing since i installed it.
can you choose what it boots like can it boot just all my music and traktor..since I dont need certain files like pictures etc.
+1 internal but I use a LaCie rugged FireWire hard drive. It’s solid and cause its FireWire it’s saves on a port.
I keep meaning to upgrade my mac so haven’t bothered to upgrade the internal but it’s defo worth it
Don’t use external hard drives for gigging. You’re just asking for it to fail at a bad time, get un-plugged mid-set, or lose it.
Keep music on the internal drive and move your pron and movies to the external…then leave it at home. If you can’t fit the music you need to gig with on your internal drive, you’re doing it wrong. (note: this doesn’t necessarily apply to mobile jocks).
If you really insist on using an external drive for DJing, get an SSD. At least they’re less likely to die from damage.
I kind of agree with you on this but just out of curiosity when is the last time you had an external fail on you? Is this not just one of those things we obsess over for no apparent reason? same as having a separate bootable drive “just in case” our OS fails!? when does that ever happen? saying that i am thinking of swapping my optical drive for a SSD.
I haven’t carried a moving platter around with me since that LaCie blew up. It’s just not worth it with USB sticks so effing cheap and SSD prices coming down every day.
Internal, but I do have a Seagate Powered GoFlex with my music/serato backed up!