USB external HD usability

[Cary B. Cornett]

As I am recording the performances of a local stage musical production (new adventure for me), I have realized I need more storage and that ability to transfer things from one machine to another without using Ethernet. I thought of using CD blanks to archive, but, MAN! that's a lot of discs to burn!

I am considering getting an external USB HD setup, but this is also new to me, so...

One of my studio computers uses an Intel D845GRGL mobo, and runs W2k sp4.
The other uses an Intel D815 mobo and runs W2k sp3. Will either or both of these machines accomodate USB 2.0, or are they limited to 1.1?

Can USB 2.0 (or 1.1) handle the throughput of 15-20 tracks for a session?

Do I need to go the extra expense of adding FireWire to my computer(s) to get decent performance?

Unfortunately, as usual this is a last-minute challenge, meaning I just about have to do this today so that I can clear off previous recordings to make space for tonight's show. :eek:

[mikebuzz]

DO yourself a favor and go Firewire I use it and I can actually mix from the FW drive ,also it's faster . I cannot mix using the USB port.
you can buy usb2.0 cards, as far as I know you just need the correct drivers for W2K

LAter
Buzz

[UpTilDawn]

From my experience, I can say the usb2 and firewire both work quite well for up to 24 tracks of recording.......... probably more.
I don't generally mix from the external drives, but from my student's experiences, I'd be confident that I could mix fairly well with maybe a small increase in lag time from a command to execution.

Consider adding a dvdrw drive for your archiving. I use a 2x Pioneer on one machine, a 4x LiteOn on two others and have had no problems. Of course that's with XPpro, not 2k....... not sure what differences you might encounter.

DanT

[Bill Park]

I am considering getting an external USB HD setup, but this is also new to me, so...

Can USB 2.0 (or 1.1) handle the throughput of 15-20 tracks for a session?

Do I need to go the extra expense of adding FireWire to my computer(s) to get decent performance?

Unfortunately, as usual this is a last-minute challenge, meaning I just about have to do this today so that I can clear off previous recordings to make space for tonight's show. :eek:

Cary,

USB 2 is, on paper, faster than firewire. I have both, I see little difference for my work.

Your big problem is going to be time. It takes time to transfer that much data.

I have a Plextor UF series DVD burner, works on firewire or USB. I take it from machine to machine for backups. But that is not what I'd suggest for you. Consider one of the solutions from wiebetech or apricorn (at the obvious websites...) that provide you with a drive in a little case that plugs into either firewire or USB. That would be faster, and reusable. You can chose the drive size. You can swap out the drives if you want. And they make solutions in both 2.5inch and 3.5 inch drive formats. Obviously, the 2.5 laptop drive size is a small package, but the drives are signififcantly more money. If it is a one-time expense, you're okay. But if you plan to archive whole drives, it could get pricy.

Bill

[Cary B. Cornett]

Well, I bought a USB2 drive enclosure and put a 120gig WD HD in it. It appears to work, although file transfers are taking longer than I expected. My son's computer, an AMD rig that was new this past Christmas, is transferring 12 tracks worth of files at just about "real time" speeds, which seems to be about half or less than what I would have expected based on what I have read here.

We run W2k on our machines, and IIRC W2k's earlier releases preceded the USB2 spec. Can anyone tell me at what service pack level W2k first included USB2 support, and whether special drivers might be involved to get full performance?

[studio-c]

In a previous thread I was bemoaning my Firewire experiences, how drives kept dropping off the screen, etc. [Thread: Anyone having problems with firewire?]. Someone said how Microsoft had hobbled the Firewire protocol (RME website I believe), someone else said that the Firewire card had to have the correct chipset.

Anyway, most of my enclosures are Firewire/USB2. So I just started using USB2 and everything's been awesome.

As a non-expert, it just seems like it's a technology (like iPods not charging on PC firewire connections, like most Adobe applications having some sort of artifacts, like running ProTools on PC) that is trying hard to bridge the gap, but not quite making it. Like it's almost there, but there are just some either native issues they haven't worked out, or else they're giving the other team a little extended middle finger (if you had a REAL computer, it would be working smoothly). I suspect the latter.

It's like swimming upstream, there's so much to overcome. It just bores me to spend time fighting it when I have creative stuff I'd rather be doing. And to come home at the end of the day having spent it tweaking software and buying parts, and realizing that not only did I make NO MONEY in the 15 hours I spent at work being frustrated, but I actually SPENT $500 and didn't get to enjoy the awesome SoCal weather or ride the rollercoaster by the ocean-- that's not how I want to spend my life.

I think I'd use the internal drives, then dump off to the external at any rate. I've never seen an internal have problems, until it totally collapses eventually. That said, back up often!

Coffee's a bit strong this morning. Wooh!

[Ed Snape]

We have been home brewing external USB2/IEEE 1394 drive boxes for about 3 years. It all started with the Mackie multitrack recorder style drive caddies. We then assembled the mateing style of drive bay into empty USB2/Firewire boxes. We have about 10 drives installed in caddies, and two of the USB2/Firewire boxes. Until last thursday we were quite pleased with their convenience and performance.

On thursday morning, one of the drives (160G Seagate) with about 30 gig of Adobe Premiere video edit stuff (200 hours work) displayed a "corrupt file" message and became non accessible.

This morning, I called a local data recovery shop for estimates, info and the like. When I told the guy that it was an external fire wire drive, he said "Oh, we see lots of those." "External drives are very prone to failure" He mentioned heat as one cause. However, the caddies we use have twin fans, so I doubt that heat was the cause in this situation, but I am very concerned about his assertion regarding external drives.

Has anyone on this forum knowledge or personal experience regarding failure rates of external drives?

[Cary B. Cornett]

I hooked up a USB2 drive to a DAW, and tried opening and running a session in SawPro (Yeah, I know, but the recording machine I used didn't have enough memory for Studio). The sound files are 16 bit 44.1k, and the session has 14 mono tracks. I am getting the "system not fast enough" message when I try to run it from the USB drive.

The computer is a PIII 866 with 512 meg ram on an Intel 815 mobo, running W2k sp3.

I tried digging around in Control Panel, and found something about assigned bandwidth percentages for USB devices, and the allocation of BW for the only device listed was 10%. I do not know whether I need to alter this setting, nor how to do so. A Google of "USB howto" does not yield anything useful.

further efforts:
A look at the MS website seemed to suggest that USB2 support for W2k was implemented in sp4, so I updated to sp4. After the update, at attempt to playback the session still got the "system too slow" message. I then ran Speedtest on the USB drive, and got a write speed of about 1064 kBytes, and a read speed of about 1032 kBytes. IIRC, this is SERIOUSLY slow, so I have to assume the problem still is not fixed...

Can anyone tell me what I am missing or direct me to a website with good information?

[olzzon]

I´m recording live using an external USB2 drive.

I record 24 tracks 44.1/24 with no problems, on my notebook.
I never had any problems with that, on my main machine and my notebook.
But on my synth machine, it runs alot slower, so i guess it also depends on the usb interface, and/or the drivers.

[Craig Allen]

Read and write speeds of 1MB/s is very slow - you are right. I generally get somewhere around 25MB/s with my USB2 Maxtor. I'm on XP, so I don't know what to look for in 2K.

[Bob L]

With Win 2K you need special drivers for your USB chipset... if your motherboard claims usb 2.0 compatibility then look for drivers on the motherboard disk or website.

Otherwise, buy a cheap usb 2.0 card for aboyt $39 and install the drivers that come with it... that will get your speeds up to about the same as firewire drives.

Bob L

[ambler]

The computer is a PIII 866 with 512 meg ram on an Intel 815 mobo, running W2k sp3.

If you are using an onboard USB port on this motherboard it will be a USB 1 port and it won't matter what drivers or OS you use it will only ever give you ~1 MB/s... it's a hardware thing. A PCI USB card of the same vintage will have the same limitation.

Get a PCI USB 2 card as Bob says. It will come with the appropriate drivers.

Mark

[Cary B. Cornett]

The various comments I just read here match up with my recent experience (thanks).

Yesterday I finally just connected the drive to my "main" DAW (P4 2.8 gig w/1gig ram on an intel D845GRGL mobo), and it immediately "woke up happy". I was able to play the session directly from the drive with no trouble.

I have another question about these drives though...
I set up two partitions on this thing, a 10 gig partition intended as a "boot" drive, and the rest ( > 110 gig) for session files. The idea is to install a "clean, just for recording" W2k setup on the smaller partition so that my son's computer can be booted up from the USB drive, set up perfectly for recording, thus letting him have his "regular" install any old way without either use having to compromise the other.

Has anyone here done something like this?
Can I do a bootable installation to the USB2 drive?
Will using that same drive both for the programs and for the session files compromise performance at all (running mainly SAW without a bunch of other foolishness going on)?
Are there any special "gotchas" about the install process?

[Bob L]

I'm sorry I have never set up a boot from a USB drive... not sure what's involved.

Bob L