Use an external hard drive as producers or DJ?

One of the most important advice producers and musicians often give is: make sure you have multiple backups of your music and projects! It has happened so often that producers or other musicians lose their files and songs due to theft or fires.

This happened, for example, at Mr. Probz when his studio went up in flames, causing him to lose a lot of music. Jack $hirak and Dio were the victims of theft, causing a lot of music to be lost. That's why many producers say that an external hard drive is the best investment you can make as a musician!

What is important with an external hard drive?

You have a number of differences that you should pay attention to when you buy a hard write, below a brief explanation.

USB 2.0 of 3.0

USB developed by and therefore occasionally new versions come out that work faster. 3.0 has since become the new standard so always choose USB 3.0. USB 3.0 is up to about 10x faster compared to USB 2.0 if the device you connect to is also compatible with USB 3.0. If the device, such as a laptop, is not compatible with 3.0, then you can use it as normal, but you miss the benefits of 3.0.

An SSD external hard drive

SSD stands for Solid State Drive and is very fast compared to HDD up to about 4x the speed of HDD. In your producer laptop or computer, it is certainly advisable to place an SDD. For an external hard drive, this is relatively expensive if you have the budget choose an SSD. We use HDD disks ourselves and they also work great!

Storage

Depending on the complexity of your projects and the number of files, music can quickly add up to a lot of data. Make sure that you choose an external hard drive that has enough space for your data, check how much you need and base your choice on that.

Build quality

If you take a hard disk with you on the road, make sure you choose a sturdy model, such as a Lacie like the one below that can take a beating and water.

Save music in the cloud

You can also choose to take a paid Dropbox account and also store your music in the cloud, that's always good! We do advise you to also have an extra backup on a hard disk if something goes wrong with your Dropbox account.

External hard drive for DJs

As a DJ you can also connect a hard disk to your media players, so you don't have to use a USB Drive. Check whether your media players have a link function so that you do not have to connect two hard drives, but the media players can read both from an external hard drive.

External hard drive for musicians/producers

Make sure you save samples and projects well! Splice also has a handy feature that automatically saves your projects in the cloud, when you save a project you will immediately receive a notification to make a backup.

As a producer, never forget to make backups!

Velcro your hard drive on your laptop

A great solution for using your hard drives effectively is to attach them to your laptop with Velcro. A number of producers do this, including Afrojack, so that your various hard drives do not fly around when you are traveling but are attached to the back of your laptop.

Back on the road #focus pic.twitter.com/QelETJvsLm

— Afrojack (@afrojack) 24 januari 2019