firewire/external drive???

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Signal 9 Studio

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Does anyone use a firewire card and an external drive? If so is there any latency problems with this setup? I'm debating whether to use the external or not...that way I can just switch out drive on different projects....I'm getting into video editing as well as audio.
 
Almost everybody uses either a 2nd internal drive to record to or an external drive. I personally run mine USB 2.0, but I have done firewire before. You just want to set it up where your programs are on your main drive and you record your actual audio data to the external drive. Latency won't be an issue, actually you should notice an increase in performance, since the main drive will not be working as hard.
 
cawhite12 said:
Almost everybody uses either a 2nd internal drive to record to or an external drive. I personally run mine USB 2.0, but I have done firewire before. You just want to set it up where your programs are on your main drive and you record your actual audio data to the external drive. Latency won't be an issue, actually you should notice an increase in performance, since the main drive will not be working as hard.
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Audio latency won't be an issue. However, FireWire does have higher latency than the internal ATA bus. For most apps, this isn't a problem, but I have met the occasional poorly-written audio app that assumes it can request data from the disk at the very last possible moment, resulting in really bad hiccups when the hardware doesn't respond with a chunk of audio data in time. Not common, by any means, of course....

If you have the option of a second internal drive on a separate bus, I'd go that route. If that isn't an option, get a FireWire drive and don't worry about it.
 
thanks

the reason I was wondering about the external is I plan on shooting some short films for myself. That way I can just take the drive out and replace it with a fresh one without burning everything to disk. I'm pretty sure that the shorts are not something that I'll finish quickly like my audio projects. So USB will work but firewire will probably be better? I use Vegas and I'm getting ready to load Vegas 6.0 after I finish the project I'm on.
 
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