If you're into making music, you'll quickly hit a snag with storage space. When you record a bunch of tracks, especially using mics, those session files can eat up your hard drive fast. And if you’re more into sampling and MIDI production rather than live recording, you encounter a separate storage concern. All those libraries and instrument packs can pile up surprisingly quick too.
Lots of musicians and producers are fans of MacBooks because they look cool, are built well, and sometimes even run music apps better. But, the basic models come with really small SSDs, which means you run out of room pretty quickly.
The solution? External hard drives or solid state drives (SSDs). But don't just grab the biggest, cheapest one you see. Storing music files is a bit different from saving your regular files, so you want to make sure you get the right kind of drive for your music projects.
What to Look For in Hard Drives for Music Production
When selecting an external hard drive or SSD for music production, here are the top traits you should prioritize.
Reliability
Your use case for these drives is a bit different. Typically, you’re going to fill them up once, and then they’re going to sit. You want to retain access to session data because you never know when you might want to revisit an old track.
But if, after several years of storage, you plug in a drive only to discover that it’s dead, you’ve lost tracks that you’ll never get back.
Look for hard drives that boast superior reliability. Typically, this means sticking to well-known brands with good reputations. This isn’t the place to aim for the cheapest hard drive on the market!
Durability
Durability is another strong concern for your music production hard drives. You don’t want one jostle or drop to ruin your files completely, so look for ruggedized drives or those with some form of drop protection.
Speed
If you choose a conventional hard drive, make sure it’s a 7200rpm drive, not a 5400rpm drive. This speed refers to how quickly the platters inside will spin and directly relates to maximum write speed.
If you choose an SSD, even the slowest formats are faster than conventional drives, so you’ll have nothing to worry about.
Connection Type
When you’re buying a drive, go for the latest commonplace connection — even if you need an adapter to make it work with your current computer. (Currently, that’s USB-C.)
Why do we say this? Because even more important than the actual connection type is transfer speed. If you’ve ever moved a many-gigabyte project over USB 2.0, you understand: it’s going to take a while. Buying the newest mainstream connection type ensures you’ll get the best transfer speed — even if you need some kind of adapter or dongle now or later.
Consider Owning Separate Drives for Archived and Active Projects
No matter how nice a drive you buy, all hard drives will degrade over time with use. The more times you write and rewrite a sector on a drive, the closer the drive gets to the end of life.
For this reason, we recommend using separate drives for current and archived projects. Do all the editing you want on your main drive. But when you’re ready to archive a project, copy those files to a fresh drive that hasn’t seen much action. Doing this will decrease the odds of losing data to a drive failure.
Back Up Anything That Matters
There’s an old adage in IT about backups and file redundancy. It says “if your file doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist at all.”
No matter how high-quality the hard drive, failure or drive corruption is still a possibility. If you’re working with files that you cannot afford to lose, back them up. Yes, this is annoying. Yes, it requires yet more external hard drives and/or painful amounts of cloud storage. But compare the annoyance and cost with the realities of losing your (or, worse, a client’s) project forever.
One option for backing up is a RAID array, which can be configured in a redundant setup so that even if one drive in the array fails, you lose nothing. This is fairly technical and outside the scope of this piece, so here’s a quick explainer for PC and one for Mac.
A Note on File Systems
Before you do anything with a new external hard drive, you may need to format the drive. Before you start, make sure you understand the difference between the various file systems your computer offers to use on the drive.
Both PC and Mac have a preferred file system that isn’t wholly compatible with the competition’s hardware. NTFS is Microsoft’s brainchild, and Macs can read — but not write — to this format. And Apple has a few file systems, including Apple File System and HFS+, that PCs can’t read (at least without dodgy extra software).
If you think there’s even a shred of a chance that you’ll switch from PC to Mac (or vice versa), don’t use those proprietary file systems. Choose exFAT if at all possible, as it has the best compatibility with both ecosystems.
Not sure what all this means or how to reformat hard drives for music production? Here’s a step-by-step guide.
Now that we’ve covered the basics you need to know, it’s time for some recommendations!
7 Best External Hard Drives for Music Production
If you’re looking for the best external hard drive for music production (or the best SSD for music production), any of the options below should perform well. Remember the basics, though:
- Stick to reliable, well-known brands.
- Prioritize durable models with safety features.
- Choose the latest connection type and the fastest write and transfer speeds you can.
- Go SSD if you can afford to.
The models below cover a pretty good range of features and price points. While there’s no singular best hard drive for music production, all of these rank pretty highly and should serve you well.
LaCie Rugged USB-C External Portable Hard Drive
LaCie has been making quality ruggedized portable hard drives for quite some time, and their latest offerings continue to impress. Featuring a chunky-looking orange exterior, these drives were somewhat intended to evoke the durability of a basketball. And while we can’t recommend you try to bounce them on the floor, the metaphor works.
Consider these impressive rugged features. LaCie Rugged drives are rated for drops of up to two meters (far more than enough to survive a drop to your studio floor) and are crush-resistant as well. They also feature rain and dust resistance.
These drives are meant to take a beating and function well on the go and even outdoors. They’re more than rugged enough for use in your home studio and will perform well if you need to go mobile, too.
The latest models (including the one we’ve linked) feature USB-C, Thunderbolt 3, and USB 3.0 connectivity for ultra-fast data transfer. And these drives are reliable — so much so that LaCie stands behind them with 2 or 3 years of included data recovery service.
LaCie has an entire family of drives in the Rugged form factor. The Mini Rugged USB-C hard disk drive is the most affordable of the bunch and is available in capacities from 1TB to 5TB.
Check current prices on Amazon for the LaCie Rugged Secure 2TB External Hard Drive Portable HDD
LaCie Rugged USB-C External SSD
Yes, on the surface, the LaCie Rugged SSD looks quite similar to the previous hard disk version. The only visible difference is the center panel, which swaps out a metal look for even more rubberized orange. But inside? LaCie has packed in all sorts of significant improvements.
Unlike conventional hard drives, which have spinning platters (and motors to power that spinning), solid state drives have no moving parts. This makes them more durable and reliable by default. But LaCie didn’t stop there: they increased the ruggedization even further.
The SSD version of the LaCie Rugged can withstand drops up to three meters. There’s also an upgrade to IP67 extreme water and dust resistance, plus crush resistance up to a two-ton car!
Data write speeds reach 950MB per second thanks to the Seagate FireCuda NVMe architecture. This speed blows away what any conventional hard drive can do and easily bests many lower quality SSDs, too.
As if all that weren’t enough, you also get Seagate’s self-encrypting technology on this drive if you want it. And the included Rescue Data Recovery service increases to five years at no added cost.
There’s really only one downside here: price. Good SSDs like this one remain costly. You’ll pay nearly twice as much for a 500GB LaCie Rugged SSD as you would for a 1TB HDD in the same family, and the cost difference spikes significantly from there. This model also tops out at 2TB, whereas the hard disk version scales up to 5TB.
The cost difference is significant here. But still, if you can afford that difference. , the performance and reliability gains are deeply impressive.
Check current prices on Amazon for the LaCie Rugged SSD 2TB Solid State Drive
Glyph StudioRAID External Hard Drive RAID
If you absolutely can’t afford to lose your project files, you need a backup-friendly solution. Glyph StudioRAID RAID arrays are a professional RAID solution for serious pros and well-heeled amateurs who want to be sure they don’t lose their work.
RAID systems house multiple physical hard drives and can be configured in such a way that the drives are redundant or shared. When configured this way, one of the drives could fail and you’ll still have your data. You can swap in a new drive for the failed one and resume functioning in a secure setup.
There are a wide range of models available in this series, ranging from 2TB all the way up to 32TB. They include several interface options, including USB 3.0, FireWire eSATA, and FireWire 800. These RAID arrays can be configured in RAID 0, RAID 1, SPAN and JBOD RAID modes.
Newer models support Thunderbolt 2 in addition to USB 3.0, including daisy-chaining as well.
The build quality is solid, with an all-aluminum enclosure and an internal power supply with cooling. And there’s some advanced functionality here, too, like auto-sensing power and onboard disk health monitoring.
The company stands behind these drives with 3 years of coverage for the hardware itself, 2 years of “level 1 data recovery,” and 1 year of “Advance Replacement.”
These drives come preformatted in HFS+ and are ready to run as Time Machine drives on your Mac. If you’re using them with a PC, you’ll need to reformat them before you start using them.
If you’re a casual user, this setup is overkill—not to mention overly expensive. But if data retention matters more than cost, a Glyph Studio RAID array is among the best external hard drives for music production.
Check current prices on Amazon for the Glyph StudioRAID External Hard Drive RAID
Samsung T5 SSD
The best SSD for music production may not be the one with the most features, but the one that’ll get the job done at a price you can handle. If you know you want SSD tech but the LaCie Rugged SSD is just too expensive, check out the Samsung T5.
It lacks some of the enhanced durability of the LaCie, though it’s still rated for a two-meter drop. No moving parts inside certainly helps, as does the reinforced metal enclosure.
It’s also built with V-NAND storage: V-NAND will still blow your old HDD away in terms of read/write speed, but it’s about half the speed of the NVMe storage in the LaCie SSD. The T5 is available in 1TB and 2TB configurations.
Another thing worth noting: the Samsung T5 is tiny. As in, fits in the palm of your hand, measuring just 2.28 by 2.91 inches. That’s a great thing for portability, though honestly it can be a little too easy to lose this drive on a messy production desk.
Samsung has included optional password protection as well as AES 256-bit hardware encryption, so you can keep your content secure on this drive. As far as connectivity, there’s USB 3.1 v2, with both USB C to C and C to A cables in the box.
One downside in exchange for the lower price: there’s no data recovery included here, just a 3-year limited warranty. Still, this is a very reasonable price for a name-brand SSD.
Check current prices on Amazon for the SAMSUNG T5 Portable SSD 1TB
Samsung T7 SSD
If the T5 was enticing other than the slower V-NAND storage type, Samsung heard you and responded with an enhanced model: the T7. Built on the foundation of the T5, the T7 swaps in lightning-fast PCIe NVMe technology for the storage solution, along with USB 3.2 Gen 2 connectivity, along with UASP support.
What does all this mean? If your computer supports all of those protocols, you can get an insane 1,050 MB/s read time and 1,000 MB/s write time — around twice as fast as the T5 and even faster than the LaCie Rugged SSD.
There’s also advanced heat control on board, which dissipates heat while also detecting heat levels. If the drive starts getting too toasty, the thermal guard will momentarily slow transfer to allow for cooldown. This addition makes the drive a little bit longer (3.3 inches), but the drive is more reliable and durable because of it.
The Samsung T7 SSD is available in several colors and in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities.
Check current prices on Amazon for the SAMSUNG T7 Portable SSD 2TB
Budget Picks: Seagate Portable or Seagate Expansion HDDs
If you’re prioritizing storage over performance or ruggedization and you’re on a budget, Seagate drives are the way to go. For prolific producers on a budget, one of these two options could well be the best external hard drive for music production.
Seagate offers one thing: lots of space for not a lot of money. These aren’t flashy drives, they aren’t SSDs, they aren’t ruggedized or particularly splashy. But if you can get 5TB of portable HDD storage for just a bit over $100, that’s saying something.
These are conventional hard drives and thus slower than the SSD options above. But they are perfectly serviceable and deeply affordable, with 120MB/s read speed over a USB 3.0 connection.
Seagate Portables are available from 1 to 5 TB, while Seagate Expansion (desktop, externally powered) drives range from 8 to 16 TB.