Recording direct to External Hard Drive?

[futbol1097]

I am recording with a Macbook laptop and am considering recording direct to an external hard drive to conserve hard drive space. Will this affect latency if I use Firewire 800? My plan is to save and record everything directly to the external so I am never saving anything to the internal HD. I use a MIDI plugin program for drums - other than that it is just instrument and vocal tracks.

Can anyone recommend a good FW 800 external that is quiet for a Mac? Either 250GB or 500GB would be fine.

Thanks,
R

 

[dgatwood]

I am recording with a Macbook laptop and am considering recording direct to an external hard drive to conserve hard drive space. Will this affect latency if I use Firewire 800?

Not if the app is written correctly.... Writing data to the HD should be happening in parallel with the software play-through process, not in series. That said, you may be more likely to experience random hiccups when you have a lot of edits on multiple tracks near each other if the application doesn't preflight its buffers far enough ahead to account for the higher disk latency. If that happens, a truckload of RAM is your friend.

 

[strangedogs]

I use FW400 HD's with my G5 Imac (I have 4 externals) - works great! FW800 should be awesome. Not sure about latency though? I have ZERO latency problems with my 1st Gen 1.8 ghz. Imac.

 

[futbol1097]

Not if the app is written correctly.... Writing data to the HD should be happening in parallel with the software play-through process, not in series. That said, you may be more likely to experience random hiccups when you have a lot of edits on multiple tracks near each other if the application doesn't preflight its buffers far enough ahead to account for the higher disk latency. If that happens, a truckload of RAM is your friend.

Dgatwood - How do I setup my application to write data in parallel? Is that a settings option on my DAW (currently GarageBand but Digital Performer soon) or with the HD installation?

 

[dgatwood]

Dgatwood - How do I setup my application to write data in parallel? Is that a settings option on my DAW (currently GarageBand but Digital Performer soon) or with the HD installation?

That's strictly a question of how the software was written. It's safe to say that no computer programmer in his/her right mind would get it wrong. In fact, you'd have to go to a great deal of trouble to write it wrong.

 

[SonicAlbert]

All you need to do is save your file to the external hard drive when you create it, and from then on the program will know to write the data there. It's very easy and all the stuff going on behind the scenes like what dgatwood is talking about is nothing you need to worry about.

An external fw800 drive should be great for recording audio data. In fact, I prefer to use an external drive for audio recording and playback.