Selecting an external Hard Drive for Laptop

Hi. If you can within your budget, I would get an USB3 HD or SATA (if available), with 7200 RPM. Other will know more about HD RAM.
But I ran my projects (a few years ago) from an USB external HD, with few problems.
The problems I had was due to my external HD being to slow (5400 rpm green HD).
I have one USB3 HD now, that is used for simple projects between my laptop and studio pc, without any issues.
Hope it helps.
Best of  luck.
 

Fred Holmes
 
I'd go for a usb3 device (if your laptop has it). Disk rpm is a factor but I don't think you'll find a 7200 external rpm disk(at least I couldn't when I was looking for one)

There are dozens of 7200 rpm external drives available, just not all in a credit card form factor. A search at Newegg.com specifying 7200 rpm in the filter yields 283 hits. But finding out what the drive in the box actually is can require opening the case (voids the warranty) or connecting it and using the properties page to find the model number. The manufacturer's spec sheets tend to treat the actual drive as a mystery. You are much more likely to get a slow drive if you buy small size or a USB powered model, because battery/power saving is the only good reason that 5400 drives are still on the market. The main issue, once you have the drive you want is to make sure it is not a "green" drive or a power saving drive controller if you are doing live recording to it. If it spins down or powers off that can get bumpy. You can take complete control of the situation by buying a well specced drive housing and putting your own full sized (not notebook) drive into it. 
 

Nope, these guys are in the past.  I use a Samsung Evo 850 SSD with a Nexstar Case-this is connected via USB 3.  I can easily run 50 tracks of audio, with instruments and effects and all low-latency.  I only use it for recording, and video work and transfer files onto other media for storage so it's only 128 gigs and this only cost me 150 bucks.  
 
Honestly using spindle harddrive these days for audio and video will only create headaches.
 
Ben

Been using Spindle drives to capture Live audio for YEARS.  No issues.  USB 2.0 and old 7200 RPM (some even IDE).
 

If you plan on using the drive for more than backup or just want to know the performance characteristics of the drive, consider buying the enclosure and drive separately. If you change the project folder in SONAR preferences and the drive is not available when SONAR starts up, the program will change the preference setting back to the default "C:\Cakewalk Projects" and use the path until you manually change the preference setting.

ricoskyl
So solid state is the smart of it's combined with a generic HD. At that point, it seems the HD specs would be a lot less important. Interesting.

Sorry, I don't check this forum everyday.  A lot of the stuff your talking about is now obsolete.  Raid, NTFS, FAT. Honestly just buy a smallish SSD drive whatever you need, perhaps buy a second storage drive.  They're so cheap now, we're in a different time now.  Gosh most of the advice in this post is last decade, and I should know I've been in this caper now since 1999.  All hard drives these days' are NTFS, FAT 32 was the old standard and meant that you couldn't haven't have files any bigger than 4gig.
 
I run massive video files off my hard drive and I'm only just reaching the limit.  And by massive video files, we're talking 50fps and 60fps over laid on top of one another...so 6gig and more going through the pipe at one time.  Music wise, I was pushing 48 tracks of audio, effects and 10 VSTi's last year and only at the very end did I need to increase the latency.  All through the recording I was able to use Guitar Rig 4, whilst recording-and not have any audible latency until the very end.
 
A swapable HD wont effect Sonar, I've run a swapable HD system since 2010.  If you run into any problems just clear the INI file.  Don't ask me off the top of my head about the details.
 
Just run Sonar off the laptop drive, along with samples and the like and everything will be fine.
 
Cheers Ben

SSD prices have come way down.  Yes spindles are way cheaper, but now USB 3.0 SSD is the way to go, and  I even use a USB 3.0 thumb drive that's 128G for recording sessions that I got for around $50.  Makes it so easy with portability and ease of use, and the write speeds are close to SSD.
 
If you have to buy a mechanical hard drive, I'd recommend one for backing up projects to, but use SSD or flash storage for writing I/O.