Im not sure what to do because i run everything off my external drive when DJing. Just being able to plug in the western digital and not hastleing with another power cord might be nice.
I have a 1TB western digital MyBook. i think they run a little under 200 now. works fine with me. one more cable to plug in isnt too much of a big deal
See thing is not like i need that big of a drive. As of right now my Music collection is 80 gigs, so thats why i was thinking the self powered ones might be good.
That is a pretty nice raid array for the price, i dunno if i would want to carry it around though those USB bus powered drives are so handy. I personally have a laptop with 2 inbuilt hard drives so i do pretty good for space.
Anyone looking to get an external drive should really look to see if upgrading the hard drive in their computer will give enough space. Alternatively you could upgrade the drive in your laptop and put the existing drive from your laptop in an external bus powered case.
Yeah I’m hgettin sick of luggin that thing around to my club gigs . I think I might pick up some little 200 gig usb drive shorty . But for a 12 hour shift at a strip club that thing is a lifesaver!
I love my WD Passport. It’s a 160 gig, but last I checked they were making them up to 320 gig. It’s small, durable, and doesn’t need that extra power cable, which is important for me. I know many people that have a passport and no one has had any problems with them.
I do however notice that if I’m accessing the external HD in Traktor, the audio latency shoots up and I get pops and cracks. Not sure if this has to do more with access time or with so many USB devices working at once, but I just keep my playing music on my internal drive and it’s all good.
Ditto on the WD Passport. Mine is 120 gigs and its maxed out with mp3s. I have 4 gigs of memory on my laptop so I have Traktor setup to load the mp3s fully in RAM so I don’t have any audio latency issues.
I’m another WD Passport 320GB User as well and have used at gigs already
without issue. I also ‘cache’ my tracks at maximum with the onboard 4GB of RAM in a MacBookPro.
I’ll add, now that I have the VCI-100 SE and I use the Audio8 as my audio interface connected to my MacBookPro… I encountered a USB port issue (not enough ports). I had originally picked up an a/c powered portable 4 port USB2.0 expansion device. This provided enough power to drive the VCI-100SE and the WD Passport from, but you are still left with a power supply connection that I was trying to ditch from picking up the WD Passport drive from a former powered firewire drive in the first place.
I then scoured ebay and picked up one of these ExpressCard/34 Express Card to USB 2.0 Port Hub Mac/PC for $20 from hong kong. Now I have everything working and the only power cord I need is for the laptop now.
connections are
Native USB Port 1 on the MBP (left hand side by power connection) = Audio 8
Native USB Port 2 on MBP (right side of machine) = WD Passport 320GB HD
Express Card 3/4 USB Port 1 = VCI-100SE midi controller
with 3 ports to spare…
I originally plugged the WD Passport drive and the VCI-100 into the Expresscard, but I couldn’t get enough power to the WD Passport drive to even mount on the mac desktop. So, I then switched back over to the native port on the right hand side of the MacBookPro for the WD Passport drive.
I like express card 3/4 solution, because it’s compact, cheap and a few less cables needed to plug in when setting up / breaking down (usb and power).
The only slight weirdness is that the Express Card is slightly sensitive in popping out. but since i’m not bangin on the laptop too hard anyway, it shouldn’t be any issue during a performance. Also, it’s the midi controller connection, not the Audio 8 interface or hard drive, so fear of audio dropping out is minimized/removed. If I happen to bump out the express card, I push it back in again and VCI-100SE is still working properly within Traktor.
I just bought the 320gb buspowered WD Passport, and I can only recommend it, not having to think about yet another poweradaptor is absolutely worth it all, and its really small..! Only thing is, the cabinet is made of plastic, which I’m not sure can handle too much pressure, but I keep mine in a seperate pocket in my bag, this is surely enough to keep it safe..!
I have the 250gb version of the WD passport and I can recommend it as well. Haven’t had any problems and it’s light, one cable, started working straight away with no fuzz at all. I’ve had it only for 6months so can’t say really for the longer usage.
You could partition what you want to keep on another section on your drive in the meantime, format the OS partition, then optionally merge the partitons back together.
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