Best External Hard Drive For Music Production. We review the top hard drives for the studio and recording music. We all know that studio files such at Pro Tools, FL Studio and even Logic sessions can all add up and take a lot of space. This great hard drive has all the space you need and with a. “WD listened to the Mac community who wanted the simplicity of a USB external drive that complements the design of their Mac computer. Fanless for cool, quiet operation. Easy, plug-and-play set up. Fully recyclable product packaging. The new WD My Passport for Mac portable hard.

Thousands of people every day experience what at first seems that their external USB or Thunderbolt HD, either 2.5' portable or 3.5' desktop model is dying, is dead, or all hope is lost for it. Good news is that you have roughly a greater than 50-60% chance that your external hard drive is perfectly fine! The great news at the end of the tunnel of an apparently failed or failing external hard drive. When checked on another computer, and with no need for spending money on data extraction expertise or software, the very likely case is that your external USB or thunderbolt HD is in fact fine, and merely the card interface, or SATA bridge card has failed or is failing. Keeping a HD dock around handy, or cheaper still a $20 hard drive enclosure or a SATA to USB connector can be a real life saver in getting your drive back to use, when the drive itself is fine, and merely its interface card has gone bad. The SATA bridge card inside a USB external HD has a very high failure rate in general Typical SATA bridge cards as seen inside a 3.5' external HD with power input (#1), and 2.5' SATA cards (#3, #4, #5) What are the realistic odds your HD is perfectly fine? There are no hard facts whatsoever, especially since so many people discard their assumed “dead/faulty” hard drives, but a good educated conclusion from years of examining and seeing this issue is that for hard drives made since 2010, and not dropped or generally abused, is that a minimum of 50% conservatively are perfectly fine, if 4 years old or less!

I personally estimate however that it likely approaches 65%+. If your hard drive fails within the first 2 months, highest liklihood is 'infant mortality' (see below), common to new HD where failure runs 'high'. Considering how many external hard drives ‘fail’ (rather the SATA bridge more than half the time) each day, that is a very high number of perfectly fine HD that are tossed! This is especially common with 3.5” desktop HD that are connected 24/7 with power and see a lot of data transfer. People wrongly conclude that “X” mfg.

Just made a defective drive, when in fact their 3.5” drives inside the plastic enclosure is 100% fine. I have personally seen well over 200 of these dead SATA cards and additionally seen 3 fail within a one hour span of doing a large data copies. One of the very reason pros use bare HD as inserted into HD docks is not just the saving of space and the need for endless USB cables, but the elimination of the need for this high failure-rate part. What hard drives WONT allow removal of the SATA card as a work-around and fix?

The rare exception (but growing more common) is a 7mm thick 'slim' external USB HD in both Toshiba and WD in certain models where the SATA bridge has been incorporated into the HD controller board, to save time of mfg. And money in production costs. Current production (late 2013 and on) Toshiba 2.5' 'Canvio' and most USB WD drives have incorporated the SATA card into the HD controller boards which eliminate a quick and easy fix on this issue.

Larger 'desktop' external hard drives (i.e. 3.5' boxed drives) do not encounter this issue currently from any mfg. The work-around for this issue on 2.5' HD with incorporated SATA and controller boards is the purchase of an identical HD and swapping their controller boards. Non-removable SATA card (incorporated as one into the controller board) as found inside some external USB HD enclosures Removable SATA card as found inside most external USB HD enclosures What exactly is the SATA bridge card in your external HD? In the middle to late of 2009, most all external hard drives both in 2.5” and 3.5” reached the shelves in SATA III. How to download steam games for free mac. These small SATA cards or 'bridges' are used to translate between the hard drives’ interfaces and the enclosures' external ports (USB, Thunderbolt, Firewire).

Additionally these small bridges not only transfer power but also of course the data. Unfortunately these SATA bridge cards have a very high failure rate as they are burdened with moving power (in 2.5' HD) and of course data.