Let's Talk About Storage
As many of you know today’s modern computers and laptop can lack pure storage space. And what they do have quickly get’s occupied by OS, critical programs and the like. If you are a musician, work with video or photos, you already know the built in storage is not enough.
As someone that does all three of the before mentioned, there is absolutely no way I could house everything on my laptop. VST downloads and samples easily take up over a TB for me. The you add large video files, projects, songs etc you find yourself needing a storage solution.
So here are my storage solutions:
Cloud Based: as a Mac and PC user I find myself jumping around a lot. I will usually gravitate towards iCloud for my web based solution. However, I do work with people and have clients that do not use Apple products, in those cases I will use Google Drive. These are fine solutions for storing documents, but not critical files and large projects.
Other disadvantages are it is hard to share documents to people that do not share the same eco system. The other is you pay monthly, right now I am almost maxed out with my 200Gb plan and will have to move up to the 1TB plan at $9.99/ month. After a year that will cost you $120. In addition if you want to get the data out you will probably need an external solution anyway.
Build a PC: I have one that I built and it’s fully tricked out and customized the way I like it. It has dedicated drives for music, VST, games, OS etc. Basically everything has its own large drive. This is a great solution but it is extremely costly and in a lot of ways not practical at all.
External Storage: With my current set up this is how I manage files and large programs. I am able to move files back and forth to my cloud storage option for on the go. But I also have something that is stationary and acts like a large internal HHD.
Options range from highly mobile to more stationary solutions.
Thunderbolt users my recommendation is LaCie d2. Even better this has a USB 3.1 and a Thunderbolt 3 pass throughs at add connections to your system. Super valuable if you are a Mac.
USB 3 I recommend the Seagate Expansion Desktop. Tried and true.
The solution I use is a hybrid and I find it works great. Larger format external HDD, cloud storage for larger files and projects plus my internal storage which I try to keep as clean as possible.