Best Hard Drive for the Akai MPC 1000

Let’s face it: Your Akai Professional MPC 1000’s pitiful 16MB of on-board memory isn’t going to cut it. One of the reasons I personally bought an MPC 1000 is for the portability and capability of supporting a hard drive. I have a lot of sounds, tracks and sequences and need to back these up as much as I possibly can. I’m not too big of a fan of sliding a card in and out of my MPC either. Always remember that you do have the option to connect your MPC 1000 to a Mac or PC via it’s built-in USB port and simply drag and drop your sounds between your set up and the MPC’s compact flash (CF) card. You want that 80 GB, don’t you? I thought so. Also note, this is to only increase your storage memory. If you are looking to increase your sample time, continue reading for a different device you will need.

So what is the best hard drive for the Akai MPC 1000?

You’ll need the following:

Akai’s special MPC adapter
A 2.5″ inch hard disk drive (laptop style) – Certain drives we’ve researched that actually work.

Hard drive adapter for the MPC 1000 — The Akai HDM10 Hard Drive Adapter, a mandatory device to have if you’re looking to use an expansion hard drive.

First thing’s first: you absolutely need a device made by Akai to install an expansion hard drive. It is called the HDM10, an adapter to allow the installation of a hard drive on the MPC 1000 and 2000 models. Once you’ve purchased this (it’s cheap), you’ll need to install it onto your MPC 1000. This takes some screw driver work but it’s not difficult whatsoever. Just so you know: it is not an external hard drive — You plug you hard drive into the HDM10, which is installed inside of the MPC (see video below).

If you’re looking to increase your sample time, please do not expect it to do so by installing an external hard drive. For this, you need Akai’s EXM128, a 128 GB memory expansion device (increases record\sample time to 24 min). It’s a little costly, but if it’s what you desire, we recommend grabbing it.

[Related Article: Which Akai MPC Should I Buy?]

In terms of your actual hard drive, we need to get very specific here. You need to be careful of which hard drive you are looking at with particular specs. First of all, SATA (serial ATA – a type of storage device), are not supported by the MPC 1000. You need to make sure the hard drive is IDE (integrated drive electronics – a simple interface for data), and IDE only. Not only does the hard drive have to be IDE, but it must be 2.5″ (laptop style).

Lastly, we’ve done a lot of research and tinkering around with HD’s, and we’ve found that although some hard drives of 120 GB capacity can work with the MPC, they can be a bit laggy at times and cause some inconvenience. This is only word of mouth, so purchase at your own risk. This is why we recommend not going over 80 GB. If you want to save money and don’t think you’ll be using all 80, going even lower is completely fine. I have ten years worth of samples and it only adds up to about 60 GB. We’ve found the best hard drives for each capacity for the best price and list them below (these are guaranteed to work). Whatever you do, do not go over 120 GB! There have been instances of the MPC 1000 not even recognizing the device.