Good recording quality: While audio doesn’t need to be podcast quality, recordings should be intelligible and free from hiss, rumbles, echoes, or the excessive background noise that plagues poorer-quality recordings.
The UX560 is also the slimmest recorder we tested-at 0.43 inch thick it can easily fit in a shirt or pants pocket. Like many of the other recorders we looked at, it comes with an adequate amount of onboard storage (4 GB) but accepts microSD cards, so you can record and store hundreds of hours of recorded audio should you need it.
It also offers a better collection of features than the other models we tested, with an easy-to-navigate menu system, a bright backlit screen, 39 hours of recording time (in MP3 format), 27-hour battery life, voice-activated recording to pause and restart after silences, and a pop-out USB 3.0 connector that lets you recharge the recorder and transfer files to a computer easily. It produces clear, understandable audio in classroom, quiet office, and noisy coffee shop settings. In a new round of testing in mid-2017, the UX560 received the highest overall ratings from our panel of test listeners. Then after the recording session copy the data to the large external drive.The UX560 is similar to our previous, now-discontinued pick, also from Sony. I bet you get the best performance recording to the system drive.
Loading software and swap and data all on the same drive would make the head "thrash" but now there are no "heads" on a flash drive. The reasoning used to be that the read/write heads would move to much. I think the old advice to not record to the system drive goes away. Today if you need performance you buy a solid state drive. Without knowing the bit density you shouldn't care about RPMs. So 7200RPM only puts more bits under the heads if the bit density is equal.
That is the product of the bit density times the rotation speed. What you need to care about is the number of bits that fly under the read/write heads per second. For recording you care about the "sustained rated" which is much lower then even USB2. Cache is typically small, like 32MB give or take. The kind of connection (USB, FW, Thunderbolt) only tells you how fast the connection between the computer and the drives "cache" is. It also makes it easy to defrag the work partitions, to keep large blocks of free space available. The advantage is that by "cordoning off" a partition of the drive, all your input is recorded to a small area of the drive's platters, reducing the time the drive has to spend "sweeping the surface" of the platters to find sectors to which to write. You might also consider partitioning an external drive, to create at least one or two "work partitions" that will be roughly 2x-3x the size of the projects you normally create. For audio projects, an SSD could probably take anything you could throw at it. Then combine with a "bare" hard drive or SSD drive of your choice. If you'd prefer an actual "enclosure", get this: I'd suggest you consider a USB3/SATA docking station, such as: My suggestions are probably different than those that most others will offer.