external drive questions

[ryguy76]

Hi,

I have a couple questions that I hope somebody can answer. I'd like to buy my drives soon and need some help before I buy.

1. Does drive cache size matter when buying a external HD?
2. I'm going to be daisy chaining my drive and interface, which will force my drive to 400, should I just buy a 400 drive then knowing this, or is there still an advantage of having an 800 drive?
3. Can I use usb2 for sample libraries to avoid multiple daisy chained devices?
4. Is a few small drives better for storing various sample libraries than 1 large one, in terms of simultaneous access?

Thank you.

 

[dgatwood]

1. Probably not a big difference, at least for audio purposes. If you're booting off it or doing other highly random access, then yes, it matters quire a bit, but for audio... probably not a lot.

2. Buy the 800 drive anyway. If you can (i.e. if your audio interface's firmware isn't buggy), you should daisy-chain it the other way, with the drive first. Then the drive can run at the full 800 Mbps/full duplex speed while the interface runs at the 400 Mbps/half duplex speed. (When you're dealing with bidirectional data, FW400 is one fourth as fast as FW800 because FW400 can send data in only one direction at a time, while FW800 can send and receive simultaneously.)

3. I don't recommend it, no. USB hard drives are very taxing on the CPU.

4. Probably not. I mean ostensibly yes, but in theory, a single modern HD can handle recording or playing back well over 100 tracks at 96 kHz/24-bit.... Even in practice, the real-world numbers are large enough that most people won't ever hit the limit.