External USB drives?

S

sjfoote

New member
Been thinking about adding another drive for archiving audio files, and was wondering what you all think of using a 7200RPM USB drive for that purpose. Any problems with the USB drives?
 
exernal usb hard drives are fine for archiving. would have had reservations about using them for recording, but, in a moment of laziness, I had to add tracks to something I had already moved to my external drive, and recorded direct to it there. It worked just dandy!
 
sync said:
Why do some of you guys have reservations about using a USB drive for recording?
Click to expand...

Some of it comes from the fact that until recently, USB 2.0 wasn't widespread enough, and Firewire400 smokes USB 1.

It's easy enough to get a drive with both Firewire and USB 2.0, and use whichever works best with your rig.
 
They work great for archiving, but I would recomend getting an external stup where you can swap the actual drives, that way you can expand at a later date, and get more drives without having to buy the whole big deal.
 
No problems for me with a 7200 rpm external usb 2. Record to it all the time. Just for insurance, consider getting one with the highest cache memory you can find.
 
Thanks for the help! I would probably only use the USB drive for archiving completed audio files and for storage of seldom used samples and loops. I don't think I would record to it though, as I have an 80GB internal drive, that with basic drive maintenance should be okay for recording.

Anyway, I see that MicroCenter has a 160GB USB drive for $89.99 with no rebate to bother with - that seems like a pretty good price/value ratio for a hobbyist like me...
 
jabulani jonny said:
I use a portable 7200rpm laptop drive in an external USB2 enclosure for my recording drive. I have recorded up to 16 tracks to that drive with no problems. Truly, there is not as much difference in throughput between FW and USB2.

See here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr04/articles/pcnotes.htm
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There's almost no difference in throughput. What you will notice, however, is that the CPU load on the machine with the FireWire drive attached is dramatically lower than one with a USB drive attached. The difference is even more dramatic if you're comparing FireWire vs USB on an Intel chipset with a UHCI USB controller.... :)

So from an "I need disk performance" perspective, it doesn't matter, but when you're doing real-time stuff (e.g. audio) with the CPU and need every bit of CPU horsepower and front-side bus bandwidth, FireWire has real advantages.
 
dgatwood said:
There's almost no difference in throughput. What you will notice, however, is that the CPU load on the machine with the FireWire drive attached is dramatically lower than one with a USB drive attached. The difference is even more dramatic if you're comparing FireWire vs USB on an Intel chipset with a UHCI USB controller.... :)

So from an "I need disk performance" perspective, it doesn't matter, but when you're doing real-time stuff (e.g. audio) with the CPU and need every bit of CPU horsepower and front-side bus bandwidth, FireWire has real advantages.
Click to expand...

I'm not talking about USB vs. FireWire - I'm talking about USB vs. IDE! The original poster never used the word "FireWire."
 
jabulani jonny said:
I use a portable 7200rpm laptop drive in an external USB2 enclosure for my recording drive. I have recorded up to 16 tracks to that drive with no problems. Truly, there is not as much difference in throughput between FW and USB2.

See here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr04/articles/pcnotes.htm
Click to expand...

truly, that really is not accurate at all.

USB2.0 is 480 mbps TOTAL allocatable 'bandwith', so its something like 240 up 240 down, or any thing that equals 480.

FW is 400 mbps EACH direction, that is 400 up, and 400 down.

i accidentally bought a usb drive at first, and it was a complete no go. it couldnt handle 4 tracks tracking for some reason. yes it was 7200 rpm...

dude, you're 0 for 2 in my book, between this and the dual monitor thread.
 
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