usb 2.0 hard drive fast enough?

  • Thread starter Thread starter giraffe
  • Start date Start date
giraffe

giraffe

i love negative rep
is a 7200rpm usb 2.0 hard drive fast enough to handle 24 tracks?

(or at least write 18 at the same time)

i guess i specks about as fast as firewire, but would like to hear from someone that has seen it work.



thanks
 
USB2 has a max speed of 480 Mbit/s (in comparison SATA 300 has 2400Mbits/s).
A 2-channel 16bit WAV file at 44100Hz can be around 1 Mbit/s to 2 Mbit/s, sometimes less, sometimes more.

So that's theoretically around 400 to 800 tracks at once at 16/44100Hz.

The real issue with this is what else is connected to the USB bus, and how the flow of data is managed. I have heard of glitches occurring when people have lots of things on the same USB or Firewire bus that their recording interface, or recording medium, is attached to.

I've never seen this scenario in use myself though, so your mileage may vary.
 
interface will be fire wire, probably just a mouse and a keyboard on the same buss.
 
giraffe said:
is a 7200rpm usb 2.0 hard drive fast enough to handle 24 tracks?

(or at least write 18 at the same time)

i guess i specks about as fast as firewire, but would like to hear from someone that has seen it work.
Click to expand...

Real-world max for USB is more on the order of 320 Mbps, IIRC, but you're still at five times the needed bandwidth for that many tracks @96kHz/24bit. Bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.

As long as your CPU is fast enough to throw that much USB data around quickly enough, it will probably be fine as long as your audio app knows how to cope with the higher latency of an external HD. Basically, this means the app has to ask the drive to send data well before the data is needed. This also means you should probably load up the machine with RAM so that it can.... :)
 
2 ghz core duo
1 gig ram
macbook.

prob with digi 003


(currently working on a g4 933 single with a digi oo1. hey, it's done me good for a long time.......)
 
i could just take the hd out of the case and put it in the comp but i really don't want to re-install everything. and you can't just copy the entire contents of the hard drive like you could in os9.
 
why not record the material and save it on the internal drive, then save your session/files and transfer them to the external drive to work on it and archive it?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top