Can I use a USB external hard drive to record?

E

e_rock

New member
Hey folks.

Are USB external hard drives up to the task of recording? I use Reaper with a Delta 1010. To this point, I've just been recording (2-3 simultaneous tracks) to the same hard drive as my operating system and it's worked fine. But hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be doing a lot more recording, and may use up to 8 tracks simultaneously. I think the obvious answer is to add an additional internal hard drive, but are USB external drives up to the job for my purposes?

They're cheap and I don't have firewire. I hope to upgrade in a year or so, so I'd prefer from investing in another internal drive until then.

thanks!
 
everything else being appropriate there is no reason not to use USB 2. drives as recording media

have more then one option for field recording but between 02 and 06 my primary set up for less then 24 tracks involved laptop, firewire A/D tracking to USB 2 HD

I typically bought my own enclosures, bought HD with which I had acceptable experience. I have not experienced problems with Seagate Barracuda PATA 3.5 in and Momentus 2.5 (know everything has shifted to SATA but the PATA have not all been replaced and have much less experience with dependability of any SATA)

A year ago I had a real problem with a client's Maxtor One Touch. Several hours of work was completely lost. Typically I track to my drives and back up to clients, but client wanted to track to his drive, we had used it successfully on a live snapshot recording months earlier and he claimed he used it regularly. At the time he got it the One Touch was one of the most cost effective ($/bit of storage) options available

Personally I think all manufacturers are building to price, I don't think anyone is building drives with audio demands in mind (in old days server drives or the SCSI 10&15K drives were best case choice, though not infrequently noise being issues with either) and don't expect to experience mean failure rates anywhere near what I have in the past, that said pretty much anything for which a cursory search doesn't uncover extreme failure rate is probably OK
 
e_rock said:
Hey folks.

Are USB external hard drives up to the task of recording? I use Reaper with a Delta 1010. To this point, I've just been recording (2-3 simultaneous tracks) to the same hard drive as my operating system and it's worked fine. But hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be doing a lot more recording, and may use up to 8 tracks simultaneously. I think the obvious answer is to add an additional internal hard drive, but are USB external drives up to the job for my purposes?

They're cheap and I don't have firewire. I hope to upgrade in a year or so, so I'd prefer from investing in another internal drive until then.

thanks!
Click to expand...

Let us look at it mathematically. The max number of simultaneous tracks depends upon at what resolution you record.

If your A/D hardware converts audio at a rate of 44,100 times (samples) per second and each sample uses up 16 bits to describe its value, simply multiplying 44,100 x 16. This gives a data stream of 705,600 bits per second for each track going to the external drive.

USB-2 has a general transfer rate of 480,000,000 bits per second. In a perfect world it would take a stream of that much data before you would begin to see any problems.

480,000,000 divided by 705,600 = 680 possible tracks

Even if you increased your sample rate to 96,000 and bit depth to 24 then 96,000 x 24 = 2,304,000 bps or 208 simultaneous tracks.

I think you will be safe recording 8 tracks at once as long as your software can keep up. :D
 
Depends. To say that USB hard drives can eat CPU is a gross understatement. With small I/O transfers at full throttle, it is possible for a USB hard drive to eat almost the entire CPU power of a single CPU core on a fast Core 2 Duo just to handle the I/O. With larger I/O transfers, it can be as low as single digit percentages. The transfer size used depends on a combination of factors---fragmentation, amount of free RAM, what size blocks the application itself requests, etc.

So the answer is that it may work just fine or it may be an unmitigated disaster, and you really won't know whether it will be usable in your configuration without trying it. Either way, I wouldn't recommend it.

My strong advice would be to either go with FireWire or add a second internal. FireWire is way too much better at handling disk I/O to waste time with a CPU hog like USB.

P.S. A TI FireWire card costs $20. Saying "I don't have FireWire" is a copout. :)
 
My last recording session was 8 tracks into a Firepod to a laptop via firewire, recording to an external firewire hard drive. The laptop crapped out. Luckily I had a desktop nearby. However, the desktop wouldn't recognize the firewire hard drive. I resorted to using the USB 2.0 on the external hard drive. Guess what...It worked flawlessly.

The desktop was a Dell Inspiron, P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 Gig RAM...

The external hard drive is a Western Digital IDE in an iRocks enclosure.

I guess what I'm trying to say is YES...USB 2.0 will record 8 tracks.:D
 
dgatwood said:
Depends. To say that USB hard drives can eat CPU is a gross understatement. With small I/O transfers at full throttle, it is possible for a USB hard drive to eat almost the entire CPU power of a single CPU core on a fast Core 2 Duo just to handle the I/O. With larger I/O transfers, it can be as low as single digit percentages. The transfer size used depends on a combination of factors---fragmentation, amount of free RAM, what size blocks the application itself requests, etc.

So the answer is that it may work just fine or it may be an unmitigated disaster, and you really won't know whether it will be usable in your configuration without trying it. Either way, I wouldn't recommend it.

My strong advice would be to either go with FireWire or add a second internal. FireWire is way too much better at handling disk I/O to waste time with a CPU hog like USB.

P.S. A TI FireWire card costs $20. Saying "I don't have FireWire" is a copout. :)
Click to expand...

Good point. The success of this type of drive is unknown (or different for each computer) because all USB transactions are handled by software on the PC, not by the hardware as in other I/O formats. This is why it consumes more cpu power.

Thus if you have apparent bottlenecks and/or errors while using USB, another way to address it is to unload some background software services to free up resources. In other words, tweak your computer and operating system for recording and the USB drive may perform better.
 
I would personally just get an internal hard drive... can never have too many hard drives and when you upgrade you can just bring it over to the new machine. Internals are fairly cheap now, considering you can get a brand new 1TB Hard Drive for $90.00 free shipping from newegg :-D BUT if you're a tech nerd like me and want really fast read and write times a Western Digital VelociRaptor 3.0Gb/s 150GB running @ 10000 RPM with Read Times of 4.2ms and Write Times of 4.7ms and an average Latency: 3ms, is worth saving for ($160) and a little external wouldnt be too bad to hold you over :)

just my 2 cents :)

EDIT:
I found this interesting comparison of speed thought you might find helpful:
SATA vs USB vs Firewire vs eSata
 
Last edited:
xkapin_reelity said:
EDIT:
I found this interesting comparison of speed thought you might find helpful:
SATA vs USB vs Firewire vs eSata
Click to expand...

Would be better if they had used the same model of drive. The cache size differences caused it to appear that eSATA is faster than SATA, which is absurd. It's the same wire protocol running at the same data rate, so the speed had better be almost identical, slight variations in the controller notwithstanding.
 
Thanks for the feedback everyone. Sounds like I'd be fine with USB for my purposes. Although, dgatwood, you make a great point. I didn't know a FireWire cars was so cheap. It never occurred to me to go that route! Duh.

Time for a little more research. Thanks!
 
I switched from USB to firewire b/c my external hard drive has both ports. It's a 9-pin on the hard drive and a 4-pin on my laptop; which I couldn't find that cable for quite awhile.

I'm wondering If I have upped the speed? I don't notice much difference.

also, if my laptop detects the hard drive via firewire and it all works does that mean I already have a firewire card?

is there anything I need to install?
 
To the person who had difficulty recording with a firepod, to an external FIREWIRE hard drive:


You had trouble because both the firepod and the drive were Firewire. You can experience a sort of bottle-neck effect when you do that... The bus gets too busy. You would have better results using a USB hard drive with the Firewire Firepod.
 
As a last resort, get a USB device that allows you to hotswap SATA disks, record with the internal disk, and swap as needed. That way you're recording under ideal conditions, but having the USB to hotswap your archived files will function almost as well as using all external disks. I guess it depends on why you want to use external disks.

FWIW, I use an external USB3 disk (actually several) for audio and video recording, but my system is fairly new with 12GB RAM, a Win7-64bit system with SATA3 disks. My CPUs are AMD Phenom II X6, and USB3 doesn't even make any impression on resource use. I guess it really does help to know more specifically what your needs and wants, and current configurations are.

I used USB2 for backups only, though in most cases I could record with them, it's just that the drives occasionally time out when idle and I like to be able to unplug them some times. Their primary task is backup and archive. They were cheaper per GB than burning DVDs! I got 1.5TB for $60 and bought 3 of them.

Prices are so cheap, so look at all of the variables before you invest too heavily in one direction or the other. Context is everything.
 
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