Hard drive
From WikiRecording
A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as a hard drive, hard disk or fixed disk drive, is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, "drive" refers to a device distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an HDD today is typically a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air pressure) with fixed media.
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Hard drives and Recording
Harddrives are essentially a modern version of Reel to Reel. They are where the audio data from a recording is stored and edited.
Harddrive Speed
The speed of a hard drive directly affects the speed and capabilities of a DAW. Faster harddrives allow you to record more tracks simultaneously, apply effects and bounce to disk more rapidly, and import samples in less time.
The speed of a harddrive depends on four key factors: Interface, Seek Time, and RPM, Read/Write Speed.
Interface
There are sever kinds of interfaces that modern harddrives use. The most common are ATA (also known as IDE or EIDE) and SATA (serial ATA).
Serial ATA is the fastest available interface, but is most often found only in computers from after 2007 and on only the most expensive external drives.
ATA is more common, runs at a respectable speed, but is quickly becoming an out of date technology.
Also note that on external drives there is usually another interface used to connect to the computer, usually FireWire or USB 2.0. This is because ATA cables are unwieldy, ugly, and cannot supply power to a harddrive. Some external harddrives now use only SATA connectors, but this has yet to become common and very few computers come with external SATA ports.
FireWire comes in two flavors: 400 and 800. FireWire 800 is less common than 400, but runs at a much higher speed.
USB 2.0 is about the same speed as FireWire 400.
Seek Time
Seek Time is how long it takes a harddrive to find a requested bit of data. Lower seek times are better.
RPM (spin speed)
Hard drives are similar to vinyl records, in that the audio is stored on a spinning disk. Just like a record, if you spin the disk faster, you can listen to the same audio in less time. However, unlike vinyl which would play back a chipmunk's version of the record at a high speed, on a hard disk audio does not have to be retrieved in real time to play back normally. So the faster the drive spins, the quicker audio can be retrieved (this is very important for multi-track recordings.)
7,200 RPMs is the fastest spin speed for standard consumer (and most pro) hard drives.
5400 RPM, the most common spin speed, is generally considered acceptable, but not desirable.
The low end 4200 RPM drives (often found in notebook or laptop computers) are slow and will significantly decrease the performance of your DAW.
Read/Write Speed
The Read/Write speed of a drive is affected by all of the above criteria. It is usually measured in GB or MB per second. Higher numbers are better.
Hard Drive Capacity
Hard Drive capacity (often referred to as the "size" of the harddrive) is measured in GB and occasionally TB (1000 GB). The larger a hard drive is, the more audio it can store.
Notes
Some hard drives are noisier than others. Be sure to keep an eye out for the quietest drive possible, particularly if the hard drive is going to be in the same room as a microphone.
