External Hard Drive for Laptop

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drathbun

New member
I have an HP Pavilion ze4400 laptop with an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 1.05Ghz processor and 384MB of RAM. It has a 37.2GB hard drive. I am using Sonar 2.0XL. I have an M-Audio Audiophile USB external audio card.

I have USB 2.0 PCMCIA card port which I run the Audiophile through and I'm wondering if an external hard drive would work with this setup. That way I can keep all my audio files on the external hard drive and make CDROM backups.

I see alot of external hard drive "enclosures" for USB. However, I'm confused as to whether an external USB hard drive would be better than say, buying an 80 or 120GB IDE drive and putting it into a USB enclosure. What are the minimum specs I would be looking for in an external (or internal in an enclosure) hard drive in terms of RPM and minimum access times?
 
It's hard to guess how well external drives will work, espically with laptops... Generally when companies design external drives, speed isn't the #1 concern...

USB 2.0 should be able to handle the access times for a 7200rpm drive, but you'll probably notice that it still doesn't run as fast as your drives in your PC on the IDE bus.

espically if you have a USB mouse, and other things plugged in taking away precious bandwidth.

The best thing to do is to go to your local best buy/compusa or what ever and buy one and try it. See if it can handle multiple audio tracks... you may see that it can hang for certian periods of time, but then it'll skip (data latency). If it doesn't work out, just return it.

It's hard to estimate how well these drives will perform especially in an external application.

Also, putting an IDE drive in an external closure is the same as buying a "USB HARD DRIVE". They just did all the work for you.
 
I have an M-Audio Audiophile USB external audio card.
Click to expand...

(2nd response sorry...)

The USB audio will take up a fair amount of USB bandwidth because it uses what they call "Isochronous" transfers which allocate a decent amount of high priority bandwidth on the bus.

This means that if you have an external hard drive on the chain it will do "Bulk" transfers which are not high priority which means that it will not get the fastest access on the bus. This will lead to big latency issues and you'll see a decent amount of skipping in the audio when trying to playback/record tracks.

Again, give it a try and see what works...

Maybe try clearing out some space on your internal drive and work with your audio tracks on there... when you're done, back them up to the external harddrive... I wouldn't try working directly off the external drive due to latency issues.
 
No, I don't have firewire on the laptop. It has two USB 1.1 ports and I have a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card with two ports.

The M-Audio Audiophile has been working fine connected to the USB 1.1 port. If the M-Audio is connected to the USB 1.1 and the external hard drive is connected to the PCMCIA USB 2.0, will they be on the same "chain" as genob puts it?
 
drathbun said:
No, I don't have firewire on the laptop. It has two USB 1.1 ports and I have a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card with two ports.

The M-Audio Audiophile has been working fine connected to the USB 1.1 port. If the M-Audio is connected to the USB 1.1 and the external hard drive is connected to the PCMCIA USB 2.0, will they be on the same "chain" as genob puts it?
Click to expand...

in that case no, it won't be on the same chain because you have different host controllers.... and each one has it's own root hub which means that it handles it's own bandwidth issues.... try the external hard drive on the pcmcia card and see how it performs.
 
i have a USB hard drive for my lap top and i don't like it much. it always shuts off at random times and there are USB conflicts. Im pretty sure this is a rare case but it is annoying. maybe it's just the brand i got or how i have it set up.
 
minofifa said:
i have a USB hard drive for my lap top and i don't like it much. it always shuts off at random times and there are USB conflicts. Im pretty sure this is a rare case but it is annoying. maybe it's just the brand i got or how i have it set up.
Click to expand...
I have the same case with my recording computer. However, on my laptop it works great.

I'm soon upgrading my rec-PC, and I'm planning to use Firewire with the disk, since I've heard that Firewire is more stable on harddrives.
 
now that you mention it, i had recently switched from using USB to firewire (the external drive i have supports both) and there was a HUGE increase in speed. I havn't used it enough to see if it is more stable though.
 
I purchased a USB 2.0, 200 GB external hard drive a while back ($150 USD) and I use it with my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop (2.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM). It is slow for on the fly file fetching.

However, if you have enough memory to store files in RAM while playing, it is not an issue.

I am using Sonar 4.
 
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