Members Lee Flier Posted March 8, 2011 Author Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 I clicked on the NewEgg link for the USB stick and it says up to 70MB/s. I think that's pretty much up there with USB 2.0 hard drives, isn't it? I think so, yes. Which leads me to the next question: is there some reason a flash drive is preferable to a regular USB external drive? I could, obviously, get a lot more drive space for a lot less money going that route... not that I wouldn't be curious to try the flash drive, but is it the most practical thing for a DAW? And are external FireWire drives that much faster than USB 2.0? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dingoist Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 I think so, yes.Which leads me to the next question: is there some reason a flash drive is preferable to a regular USB external drive? I could, obviously, get a lot more drive space for a lot less money going that route... not that I wouldn't be curious to try the flash drive, but is it the most practical thing for a DAW? And are external FireWire drives that much faster than USB 2.0? A flash drive, will have completely different read/write/seek timings because it's all electrical (nand or nor gates, I forget which) with a USB front end. A USB external drive, is mechanical by nature (spinning platters and moving heads), so you will have seek latency, and the act of moving physical parts. Two completely different technologies, unless the external USB drive is a SSD with a big ram cache... Hmmmm. I should check that out... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted March 8, 2011 Author Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Yeah, I understand that they're different technologies and in theory, I love flash drives. I just wonder how much of a practical difference there is. Is drive speed/seek time etc. the bottleneck or is USB? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Philter Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Yeah, my current computer has a Gigabyte mobo and Antec Sonata case, and it's been rock solid for me too. Part of me is very tempted to just build another desktop rig like that, and part of me is really tempted by the mobility of a laptop.But then again, I always need a laptop anyway, so if this one works reasonably OK for DAW purposes, I might just upgrade it in a year and have both. How about build your PC in a rack mount case? You won't be able to use it on a plane but it will work great for a mobile recording rig, and it will hold up better and be more immune to theft in a club environment, and will allow access to desktop components (which are typically more affordable and higher performance.) I'm putting together such a rig right now with my retired ProTools Mix+ system, old G4 mac, and 2x 8-channel preamps. You can get rack mount cases for less than $100. Another reason I would go with a desktop or rack mount over a laptop is that I don't like to have hard drives or fans in my recording space. Even in my home studio, I punched a hole in the floor and keep my computers and hard drives on shelves in the basement below my room. I find the noise and heat of computer components to be extremely annoying. Oh, and another vote for Gigabyte mother boards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted March 8, 2011 Author Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 The rackmount case isn't a bad idea, though I'm a little hesitant to do that because desktop components weren't really made to be moved around a lot. I'd be concerned about the durability of some of the parts if I was lugging the thing around a lot. I hear you about not wanting to have fans etc. in the recording space. And actually there's a closet right behind my desk position, so it would be easy for me to put a computer in there. Obviously, I have a lot of decisions to make! I think I will first get an external USB drive and see how it goes recording on my existing laptop, just for curiosity's sake. So for the moment, my only decision is: regular ol' hard drive or flash drive? It'd be sweet to have a gigantic hard drive, but if that'll be too slow for a DAW, I guess I'll go the Flash route. And I can use FireWire for my recording interface, since my laptop has it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dingoist Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 USB 2.0 is about 480 Mb/sec. Comparing the cheapest Kingston 30g SSD, it has a 180 MB/s max throughput, and a basic stock WD 7200 rpm 250 gig hd rates a maximum transfer rate of 100 MB/s. So, 480 Mb/sec is actually translates into 60 MB/s (something to watch out for bits or "bps" (bits per second) typically uses a lowercase "b", and bytes is usually uses a upper case "B", and there are 8 bits in a byte. It's confusing, and I hate the change in scale for comparisons (often misleads consumers, or more often as not, is capitalization is just mistyped). So in this case, the bottleneck is USB 2.0. Though seek latency, and prolonged write speed might help, it's probably better with SSD but probably not worth the extra cost. Now eSata on the other hand can transfer more than 150 MB/s on some drives making SSD more appealing, though I can't say how common eSata is on your average machine. Of course, there is the tricky thing that most companies will publish their max rated throughput, and not regular throughput with latency measurements for smaller transactions. Of course, USB 3.0 changes some of this, making external SSD drives more appealing than conventional drives. I should've thought more before thinking about external SSD drives via USB, if it were really that good currently people would be doing it more. As a side anecdote, in early 2001, I met with M-System vendors who supplied flash chips for the embedded market, they showed off some early samples of the whole USB flash drives, which were a only a couple of megs. The non-usb chips were only starting to cross the 1 gig range and were way to expensive for any conventional embedded usage. They licensed out the technology to IBM for the first USB memory sticks shortly after, which brought them out to market that fall (M-Systems is now owned by SanDisk). I believe I pad $120 for a 32 meg one (in Dec 2001). Cripes, it's been a crazy decade for the flash storage players. Traditional magnetic media has been "meh". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ggm1960 Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 I haven't seen any 64GB USB drives at my local Office Depot, but they're probably out there somewhere, right? Hehe, Oh yeah! http://www.buy.com/prod/kingston-256gb-datatraveler-310-usb-flash-drive/q/loc/101/214525951.html These days my main studio computer is the 15" MBP I bought in '08. What's really nice about it is that it has both a fw400 and a fw800 port on it. I use a 320gb Glyph Porta-gig HD on the fw800 port and the fw400 is for my audio interface (Apogee Duet, Presonus Firepod or Hercules 16/12). I connect my MIDI devices to a MOTU Midi Timepiece AV that plugs into a USB port. There's also a digital display connector which I plug a 24" Dell monitor into for some good screen real estate. I like this setup at home but the best parts of it are also very portable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members js1 Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 If you do have a laptop already, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. I've managed to get my Dell laptop working quite reliably with my Steinberg MR816 firewire interface. OS is Win7, 64 bit. Recording onto the internal drive. My work laptop, with the prerequisite work software. On the surface, that combo should have everything go against it. I won't claim that it was all smooth sailing. Had to deal with dropouts, which at the end of the day turned out to be the Symantec virus checker. Disable that while recording, and it's rock solid. Lee, with your computer background - you know the drill. js Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ggm1960 Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Today in my inbox there was this. I believe this is the first USB 3 device I've actually seen. A good question though is whether it would do anything to improve the speed of available flash drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members spokenward Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 I have been peeking in on this thread thinking that it would eventually get to the i7-2600. I was thinking that this would be the logical step from the cult of q6600 that was a popular choice 2-3 years back. The motherboard chipsets were launched with a major hiccup and revised boards just seem to be arriving now. There are P67 and H67 and another variety that has not been released. Wouldn't these be contenders for DAW use? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted March 8, 2011 Author Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 I have been peeking in on this thread thinking that it would eventually get to the i7-2600. I was thinking that this would be the logical step from the cult of q6600 that was a popular choice 2-3 years back. Yeah, I'm one of those who joined the Q6600 cult and have not regretted it at all. The i7-2600 does indeed look like a killer processor and is probably what I will go with, if I do decide to build a new desktop DAW. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members spokenward Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Yeah, I'm one of those who joined the Q6600 cult and have not regretted it at all. The q6600 has been great, and it is really hard to soak 4 cores (in XP audio stuff). But - the clock speed is lagging a bit now and W7-64 is swell and Memory can be afforded so I find myself looking around too. I have not figured out the friend/foe aspects of the video and PCI-E handling on this i7-2600 so I have been doing the watchful waiting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Which leads me to the next question: is there some reason a flash drive is preferable to a regular USB external drive? It doesn't make any noise!! No moving parts You can drop it It doesn't make any noise You can carry it with you to other sessions More energy-efficient It's noiseless Oh, and did I mention the flash drive doesn't make any noise ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted March 8, 2011 Author Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Haha... yeah, I realize that but frankly, there are quite a few external drive enclosures these days that are insulated and very quiet. I agree that a Flash drive would be great for carrying to other sessions... but I wonder if I need to spend the dough to get one that large (i.e. large enough to use as my primary recording drive), when I could get a couple of terabytes in an external USB drive plus a 16 or 32GB flash drive for about the same money, or not much more. If latency and stability aren't an issue, I'd kinda rather do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Haha... yeah, I realize that but frankly, there are quite a few external drive enclosures these days that are insulated and very quiet. But not noiseless...I should have mentioned that I agree that a Flash drive would be great for carrying to other sessions... but I wonder if I need to spend the dough to get one that large (i.e. large enough to use as my primary recording drive), when I could get a couple of terabytes in an external USB drive plus a 16 or 32GB flash drive for about the same money, or not much more. Well, the latter is what I do. I record to a relatively small Flash drive (16GB), then transfer over to hard disk when the project is done. You don't need to use the flash drive as an archival medium unless you want to. Like you, I don't record a lot of tracks so I can fit several "in progress" projects on a 16GB drive prior to transferring them over to disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted March 8, 2011 Author Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Yeah, I don't think a flash drive makes a good archival medium anyway. So long as I can fit an album's worth of tracks on the flash drive, I'm good to go... so I guess I can go with a smaller flash drive and then get a giant regular drive for archiving/backup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members the stranger Posted March 8, 2011 Members Share Posted March 8, 2011 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members The Pope Posted March 9, 2011 Members Share Posted March 9, 2011 For external, I've heard that eSata is the best. Of course there's the noise, plus the port is not all that common. I am surprised a flash drive is fast enough. Does seem very convenient. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted March 9, 2011 Author Members Share Posted March 9, 2011 Who has the noisy hard drives in the studio room? Yeah... it would be pretty easy, at least for me, to locate them elsewhere. And backing up TBs of data every day, flash drives are not suitable and way to expensive, that is done to tape, automatized when we sleep. Yeah, I wouldn't even consider using a flash drive for that. Plain ol' hard drive would be ok for my purposes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members KHAN Posted March 9, 2011 Members Share Posted March 9, 2011 Just built my first PC. i5 2500k (quad 3.3 easily OC to 4 GHz), 4 gigs of ram and two 1 TB HD's for $700. Unfortunately I got bitten by the Intel Sandy Bridge chipset flaw, and am waiting for a free replacement motherboard. I have had no issues with using it as is for the interim. But it's a sweet little DAW for a pretty meager cost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members BushmasterM4 Posted March 10, 2011 Members Share Posted March 10, 2011 The specs on the i7 2600 look pretty good. I may have to build one and see how it performs as a DAW. If it blows away my current rig (which it should easily) Phenom II 965 Black. Then I'll move the Phenom guts over to my wife's system. She gets the hand me downs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted April 25, 2011 Author Members Share Posted April 25, 2011 Well, I've now done a few experiments using my laptop, the Patriot flash drive, and my new Allen & Heath ZED R16. It took me awhile to even get this setup working, because as a couple of other people hinted, the Firewire chipset thing is something of a nightmare. The chipset built into my laptop is not compatible with the A&H (and probably most higher end audio interfaces) so I had to find a FW ExpressCard with a TI chipset. I did - a SiiG, and it works, but unfortunately it doesn't lock very tightly into the ExpressCard slot and, because it's a "push to insert/eject" type of thing, it's VERY easy to dislodge the card just by bumping it accidentally (which I've now done several times). And when the card gets ejected or just dislodged in any way, I get total BSOD. So that's pretty annoying. When it's working, latency during overdubs seems to be a non issue, so that's good news. And the Patriot flash drive seems to work great as my recording drive. However, I still get occasional unexplained dropouts, likely because there's stuff on the laptop that still needs to be turned off during recording. I disable the network drivers and screen saver, and I probably need to switch to a different power profile as Craig mentioned (haven't tried that yet). So I'll continue to experiment. But I'm thinking this is probably more of a PITA than it's worth as a long term solution. It'll probably work OK for occasional remote recording, but in all likelihood I'll just build a desktop and be done with it - having to plug that card in, pray I don't bump it, and switch my whole configuration around every time I want to record something isn't very conducive to creative inspiration and it's a little nerve racking. So again I ask - what are good components these days for a DAW? I'll probably get another Antec Sonata case and Antec power supply. Probably an i7 2600 CPU - might as well, I guess. So what's a good mobo, RAM, video card, etc. that isn't mondo expensive? I'm NOT going to get a giant monitor nor a dual monitor setup - I'd rather the monitor be as unobtrusive as possible really, for the time being, especially since I will mix as much as possible on the console, not ITB. And I like my Gigabyte motherboard on my office computer, but I'm seeing tons of negative user reviews about Gigabyte's QC in recent months - lots of early failures. Maybe they're going through a bad patch. What's a good middle of the road mobo that is i7 compatible and (hopefully) has TI Firewire? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Anderton Posted April 25, 2011 Members Share Posted April 25, 2011 I probably need to switch to a different power profile as Craig mentioned (haven't tried that yet). Set CPU to 100% for both max and min states, and see if that helps. As to the FireWire card, you can buy little mechanical adapters (just a piece of plastic, really) that extend the width of narrow FireWire cards for a snug fit in wide slots. Universal Audio includes these with the Solo Laptop, and it makes for a far more secure setup. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lee Flier Posted April 25, 2011 Author Members Share Posted April 25, 2011 Did not know that about the adapter. Sounds like a great idea if I can find one! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMS Author MikeRivers Posted April 25, 2011 CMS Author Share Posted April 25, 2011 . . . my new Allen & Heath ZED R16. Ooooh! You got one! Tell us how much you love it (in another thread, please). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.