Recording to USB drive

N

noiseordinance

New member
Hello there. I've been using a PC for my DAW. I have two internal drives (one for Windows + DAW software, the other for audio library). I just bought a new fancy shmancy 15" Mac retina laptop that blows the pants off of my PC (in terms of hardware specs), but I'm limited to a single internal 256GB SSD. Obviously that's not a lot of space to do everything on, and I also would rather avoid tons of writes to the drive. So I'm curious, if I were to buy an external drive for recording onto, is USB 3.0 fast enough to avoid bottlenecks? Anyone have any pointers, or should I stick with the PC desktop setup? I only record once every month or two, and it would be nice to retire the desktop to my closet. Thanks!
 
Awesome, thank you much! My PC also had an internal audio interface, so I'd need to buy a new basic 2-input interface. I'm reading a 6 month old post that says that there's no difference between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 interfaces... is this true? The latency would be the same on both? Thanks again!
 
From what I understand, both standards far exceed the requirements for 2 channel audio interfaces.
You're storing a pint in a 2litre and 3 litre bottle. :)

The only drawback that I can think of to USB is that it's often shared with other devices.
I went for a firewire interface because everything else I use is usb. (mouse/keyboard/webcam/hub/ilok etc).

I don't know if there's any substance to that idea, but that's just what I did.
 
I would suggest you record onto your hard drive first then cut (or copy) to your USB stick. The reason being that the Hard drive will save data faster than a USB drive and there is less chances of error.
 
Floza said:
I would suggest you record onto your hard drive first then cut (or copy) to your USB stick. The reason being that the Hard drive will save data faster than a USB drive and there is less chances of error.
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I would take this comment with a generous pinch of salt - do some research on Google as to whether there really is any risk of error writing to USB on the fly. The mechanical hard drive write speed is the bottle neck in USB3 drives - I don't think you'll have any issue.

It is true your internal SSD and the SATA interface it uses is faster, but for two channels of audio, a mechanical HDD over USB2 or 3 is plenty fast enough.
 
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