Hello all! I was wanting to see if any of you had any suggestions as to which external hard drive(s) might work well with SONAR X1/X2. I am currently using a laptop until I can afford a decent DAW tower/rackmount. I am running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit on a 320GB HDD 7200RPM with 6GB RAM. I was hoping to get 1TB and stay under $200ish. Let me know what y'all think.

How do you plan to use the drive i. e. do you plan to use it as a backup, as the primary place to store the files you are recording or working on in real time, as a place to install and run the program?  How do you plan to connect the drive to the computer? USB 3, eSata, firewire? A slower interface might be pretty limiting for real time audio work.

I was planning on using the drive for primary storage of projects and maybe even real time audio. My interface is eSATA-600 6GBps. Would that be fast enough for real time? I am somewhat new to the recording/production aspect of music, so please forgive any ignorance.

If you're planning on building a desktop DAW, I would get a drive and a USB drive housing so you can use the drive later in the new computer. Or not. You could always use the drive as a backup.

Seagate and Western Digital. Just don't get anything labeled as "green" or words to that effect and make sure it is 7200 RPM.

  So, timidi, are you saying to get an actual HDD that would normally go into the desktop case and to get a housing/case for it? I hadn't ever thought about that (as long as I understand you correctly, that is).

An eSATA 600 connection should be able to run an external 7200 rpm drive as fast as an internal one. USB2 would be significantly slower. Drive docks are available with an eSATA, and one advantage to a dock is that you can be sure the drive you are using is the one you want. A lot of off-the-shelf external drives are designed for backup, and use slow or green (power down to slow speed under low load) drives.

I just now thought about this other option. My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad, and I have a docking station that will allow me to install a second hard drive into it. Would that be better than eSATA or other connections? I'll paste the link to the dock below. https://shop.lenovo.com/S...Code=0A33932#techspecs

Along with the docking station, i would use an adapter and HDD. The HDD adapter: http://support.lenovo.com...LegacyDocID=MIGR-73170 The HDD itself: http://support.lenovo.com...LegacyDocID=MIGR-74519

The thing is you can save money by building one yourself. Order a drive encloser then the hard drive you want.
 I have 4 drive enclosers,
1  old school ATA, ( $20 ) 
1 SATA ( $30) 
 1 for older laptop drives ( $30).
Then my newest is an off the shelf 1 TB. I paid over $100 as it contains a HD.

So I keep all my old drives, I never erase them, I replace my drives after a min 2 years of use and put them on the shelf. It's cool as I  have working 8 GIG drives ( 1997?)  up there.

I only have one drive in my laptop that I use for recording live sessions. ( LenovoT420) I see no reason to stream audio to a second drive while recording.  I dump the Sonar folder I created for the session to the 1 T drive imediatly and then transfer to my Desktop DAW to edit.
This creats 3 copies of every session. I also routinly backup the edited versions to the Desktops data drive so that makes 4.

That's interesting about the docking system, not sure if mine has that?? have to look later. But I bet they want a handsome coin for it.

  Cactus, thanks for the input! As for the docking station, they want somewhere around $220.