Quick question. Looking at the possibility of a new computer and wodering if an external gigabit ethernet hard drive would be adequate to record to and play back from for 24+ mono audio tracks at 44.1k 24bit. I know that firewire 400 and 800 should be adequate for that track count (and then some) and there is some debate as to whether USB 2.0 can handle that much in both directions (any experience with USB externals would be nice input as well). However, I've found very little when it comes to gigabot external hard drive hooked up directly to the computer. Thanks in advance!
external hard drive question
- Thread starter antofants
- Start date
Washburn100
New member
I thought if you set your buffer high enough, ethernet external drive would work fine? Glad someone asked this question. I will check into this more.
Thanks for the replies, guys. I thought I heard somewhere before that ethernet hard drives where a bad idea, but I didn't know exactly why. Just trying to figure out if I can live with just one firewire port on a laptop and still do everything I'd like to do. I'd like to record audio to/from a FW hard drive through a FW interface and still use an external (preferably FW) drive for orchestral samples (like eastwest silver). Will I kill the firewire bus on the computer if I chain two fW800 drives together (one for the orchestral library, the other for audio recording/playback) along with a fw interface as well? Thanks again.
Depends on your interface.
Firewire is suppossed to be daisy-chainable. That's how it's spec'ed.
But some interface manufacturers dont write their drivers right (stupidly).
Firewire has wayyyyy more than enough bandwidth to stream hundreds of simultaneous audio streams, so capacity is NOT a problem.
Good news is that it wont hurt anything to try. It will either work or not and not hurt anything.
From experience I can tell you that I have been using a Glyph firewire drive daisy-chained to my Motu828mkII for years with ZERO problems. I >did< find out by experiment that I had to have the interface last in the chain...
Firewire is suppossed to be daisy-chainable. That's how it's spec'ed.
But some interface manufacturers dont write their drivers right (stupidly).
Firewire has wayyyyy more than enough bandwidth to stream hundreds of simultaneous audio streams, so capacity is NOT a problem.
Good news is that it wont hurt anything to try. It will either work or not and not hurt anything.
From experience I can tell you that I have been using a Glyph firewire drive daisy-chained to my Motu828mkII for years with ZERO problems. I >did< find out by experiment that I had to have the interface last in the chain...