External Storage

This is a portable hard drive that is made by Glyph Technologies. Their drives are among the better ones I've used in my career and that's saying something just because drives crash all the time. The Glyph company guarantees their drives too, which is saying more than most. The one that I use is half a terabyte, or 500 GB. Basically it has a lot of space, more than most people would need for a long time. I like the fact that this drive has both USB and firewire connections, but what's more is that with the newest drives, there is also a eSATA connection for data transfer. The drive can be bus-powered with the firewire 800 channel, or it can just be powered with an external power supply that comes with it. The eSATA channel needs power from either the fire wire or the external power supply. This is a high performance drive in every sense of the word. It's very fast and it works great. I've never had a problem with it jittering or taking too long to load a session. It's also never crashed on me, making it one of the few besides my LaCie drive to do that. This is a big deal, as a drive that never crashes is a godsend to a working recording engineer, or even somebody who just has a lot of stuff on their drives. Basically, this is invaluable and at such a good price nowadays (who knew drives would get so cheap after they were so expensive for so long?) there's no excuse for not having a good drive. Other than, of course, not having any drives at all. This is worth checking out, because even if it does break its guaranteed to be fixed for free by the warranty. A good purchase all around.

This is a pretty cool device. Considering that all musicians are going to need both large external hard drives for transporting their digital media back and forth from studio to gig and back, that's certainly important. However, most people would also need a smaller flash drive for transporting the smaller files they need. Students especially need these things nowadays. I think that a great gift to get a music student (or any student who likes guitars, for that matter) would be this Gibson Les Paul Flash drive. Not only does it look exactly like a Les Paul, but it works as a fully functional flash drive with up to 1 GB of memory. The write speed of this flash drive is solid as well, at 6 megabytes per second. The flash drive claims to have a retention of up to 9 years, which is pretty impressive. I can't say for sure whether or not this is true as I recently got this, but I'm sure that with the proper care, it wouldn't be a hard thing to take care of. Besides, arguably the coolest feature of this drive is the "hardshell" case that comes with it! Technically it's plastic but it looks like the real thing. This is mostly a novelty item but I really think it's one of the more clever things that I've seen lately in that category. And it's actually a great conversation starter beyond that, so it really is multi-purpose in many ways. I'd definitely recommend it to any musician who regularly uses a computer and needs to move files between computers. Basically any college or even high school student needs one of these anyway, might as well make it a cool one.