Question

I am a home studio owner of StudioOne 4.5, Faderport 8 and a new iMac with Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.0.  Can you provide me specs for a suitable external recording drive for small projects (10 to 15 tracks with a few software  plugins)?  Specifically, what size and read/write speed?  SSD or rotational drive?  Should I consider RAID?  Is there and advantage to connecting via Thunderbolt 3 or is USB 3.0 fast enough for recording?  Thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Using a rotational drive of 7200 RPM or faster will provide you basic recording ability for realtime audio through USB 2.0 / 3.0 or Thunderbolt interface. However if you're going to do a lot of tracks, using an SSD is 5x faster than any rotational drive. With the increasingly affordable options for external SSD drives, there's no reason why not to go with an SSD. 

For more info a on external drives, read this older article from 2016 in our knowledge base: 

https://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/articles/210040523-Samples-and-Sounds-on-External-Hard-Drives