First off, I highly recommend you steer away from the uncompressed music idea. Unless your an audio engineer, your not going to be able to tell the difference. Now if you download most of your music, they the quality of mp3's will differ. I ripped all music myself and I consider my ear's to be better than the average person but still not an audio engineer. My compression specs are, at least 192kbs. I also use a Variable Rate Compressor that compresses the song based on how much information (sound) it needs to compress.

As far as the hard drive, The Lacie's are the basic external hard drives that I would recommend. If you want something slightly more reliable, look into the Western Digital external drives. If your looking for something more reliable than that, Glyph Technologies makes excellent fire wire drives but they are pricy.

Finally, I'm not sure how stuck on a PC you are, I would leap and make the investment in a Mac laptop. I can't explain how reliable they have been to us. I have used a PC all my life and would recommend a mac over a PC for SSL.

Also, to give you an idea of how much hard drive space you will need for 100 hours of uncompressed music, roughly 650 Gigabyes. I think this is completely ineffecient and using such large files will make SSL run poorly.

Insert Moderator Here < >

Wes you're a bit out
WAV audio 10MB per minute

100hrs = 6000 mins

60000MB
that's about 60GB not 650

So for 100hrs music + OS you'll be fine with an 80GB drive.

Yes, I noticed that...

to do what with? are you a house dj who does long blends? are you a hip-hop dj who scratches alot?

with an older laptop, you'll probably need to set the usb buffer higher, like perhaps 15. you shouldn't notice if you just blend, but dramatic record movements might be dodgy with a high buffer setting.

*Moved to general/resolved*

i do a bit of both. usually mix house, breaks, D&B and hiphop in the same set which is why i need so much music. i'm not an audio engineer but i used to run a hifi shop and i can tell the difference between most MP3's and CD's and i would like to keep the music uncompressed so i can easily burn standard CD's when i do a gig without serato (my CDJ's won't play MP3's).

is there any noticeable time lag with serato? i've always been spoiled with a good monitor so i can't stand delays of any kind. really keen to use a mini laptop but if the general consensus says i need a higher spec then i won't take the risk.
as for the mac i'll consider it but am having enough trouble learning PC's....

Although many people still stand by the Macs, I have had absolutely no problems with running Serato three days a week, 4-5 hours at a time on a PC. In fact, my friends that are currently using Serato and have had crashing issues have been on Macs. Not trying to start a flame war, just letting you know that there are less costly but just as reliable options.

well beez, mp3s will burn as cd audio as well, but i'm sure you kenw that.
as far as laptops, i run a mac and a pc (mac mini and a toshiba laptop) and have zero problems on either one, so that's all about personal preference.
Josh

Same here ... my Sony VAIO rocks ... really hard! I've had no problems with it running Serato or any program installed on it yet. Macs are awesome machines. Really, they are. But so are PC's ... ha ha!

my dell 5160 inspiron has not let me down yet....but only when i was running FS2 though.

no no, NI/FS let you down, not the dell, hehe ;)

what spec is your vaio spinjin?

i want one of the 11" ones but the spec is a bit lame compared to it's bigger brothers.....

anyone else using 12" (screen) laptop or smaller??

oh yeah,

think i've decided on this HD unless anyone has a better idea??

b.

"LaCie Hard Drive, Design by F.A. Porsche 250GB Firewire 400
Ref: 300703EK
LaCie Hard Drive, Design by F.A. Porsche 250GB
Item Number : 300703EK
Capacity : 250 GB
Availability : Worldwide
Interface : FireWire: 2x FireWire connectors (6 pins)
Rotational Speed (rpm) : 7200
Interface Transfer Rate : 400 Mbits/s
Max Sustained Transfer Rate : 41 MB/s
Average Seek Time (Write) : <10 ms
Buffer : 8 MB
Size : 35 x 112 x 188 mm / 1.4 x 4.4 x 7.4 in. (HxWxL)
Weight : 900g / 31.7 oz.
Supported OS : Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 2000, Windows Me or Windows XP; Mac OS 9.1 or Mac OS 10.2.1 and greater
System Requirements : PC or Mac with built-in FireWire® interface
Intel Pentium II 350MHz-compatible processor or greater; iMac®, Power Mac® G3 and greater; minimum 32MB RAM
Note: LaCie’s Design by F.A. Porsche hard drives are pre-formatted as FAT 32 volumes and can be used across multiple platforms (Windows 98SE-XP; Mac OS 9 & 10). For optimum performance, the drive can easily be re-formatted in NTFS for Windows 2000/XP users or HFS+ for Mac users. For more information about formatting, please refer to the User’s Manual.
Comments : 1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Once formatted, the actual available storage capacity varies depending on operating environment.
Box Content : FireWire/IEEE 1394 6-to 6-pin certified cable*, External AC power adapter, LaCie Utilities CD-ROM

* iLink users must use a 4-pin to 6-pin cable (sold separately) and FireWire 800 users must use a 9-pin to 6-pin cable (sold separately).
Warranty : 2 Year Limited Warranty"

Hey Beezwax,

My VAIO has a 15.4" screen. It's a Pentium 4 machine - 2.8Ghz - so it's pretty capable of running the programs I use it with. I've had no problems whatsoever with my VAIO yet, and it's been over a year already.

At any rate, I think any platform (computer) will run any application without any problems, granted the machine is devoted strictly to it and nothing (or few) else. People must keep in mind that a large portion of the problems that occur with PCs originates from buggy software or program/device conflicts (not hardware, unless it's a well-built machine). Okay, just my opinion.

how much? and why do they ask you to buy your own cables?

i would rather buy a FW/USB2 ext. drive....

i second that. you never know when you'll need to hook up to a machine that doesn't have firewire or a machine with too few usb2 ports.

thats right 3pm!

i have 1 pc desktop, 3 pc lappys, 1 imac, 1 macintosh.....

fw & usb2 certainlky comes in handy.

wow, i'm not a huge lacie fan, this is a great deal:


what they neglect to mention is that this is actually a fw800(2ports)/fw400/usb2. only con against this drive is the 1 year warranty.

dealmac.com