Two Hard Drives Walk into a Bar…
One says, “I’ve had words with that bar keep before.” The other replies, “that guy? He looks tough”. The first responds, “ya, but his bark was worse than his byte”… ouch. Sorry, it was the best I could do this early.
So who needs a separate hard drive in this age of terabytes and 4 GB RAM chips? YOU DO. Why? Because if you’re storing you’re audio on the same drive as your running your programs off of, you are taxing your system more than it needs to be.
The hard disk will be constantly moving between the program data and the audio data it is reading/writing. Adding a second hard drive, either internal or external, depending on whether you’re running a desktop or a laptop, will allow your drive to access information faster on both disks and you’ll run into way fewer CPU overload errors in your recording, or none at all if you’re lucky.
Be sure to get a drive that runs at least 7200 rpm. The disk’s storage capacity is up to you but depending on what you’re recording, podcasts for instance, you’ll likely want to go bigger; 1 minute of wav. quality audio is about 5 MB so just interpolate from there.