Are 102MBps Read / 87MBps Write Good Enough Speed For A Portable Hard Drive?

[zoobooboozoo]

Hi all.

I'm leaning towards a Silicon Power Armor A80 2TB Portable Hard drive.
I like the fact that it's shockproof/waterproof/fireproof since I want to use it with my laptop for recording/mixing/producing/DJing on the road(not in a any particularly extreme environment but on the road never the less...)

I know it has speeds of 102R/87W as opposed to lets say, a new Segate Slim 2TB, which has around 120R/120W which is obviously much faster. then again, I like the fact that the drive is rugged.

Do you think that 102R/87W is fast enough for dealing with VSTs' samples/Audio Files/Recording Audio ?

Thanks, ZBBZ.

[camsr]

Yeah that speed is fine. You could stream roughly 25 32/96 samples with it.

[metamorphosis]

Yes, but you can only calculate (approximate) stream numbers if you know the random read rates.
Then you need to know what your delivery bandwidth (Ie. firewire, usb2 or usb3) rate is.
Then take the lower of those two MegaBYTES-per-second (not megabits) rates and reduce by 1 megabyte per second for transactional overhead.
Then, divide the resultant MB/S by 0.55. That will give you the approximate number of 24-bit 96khz stereo streams you can actively channel from that device per second.
The 0.55 comes from 24-bit = 3 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits)
/ 1024 (kilobytes rate)
/ 1024 (megabytes rate)
* 2 (stereo)
* 96000 (96khz).

[zoobooboozoo]

Thx for the replies guys.

@metamorphosis: so how mnuch better would the segate 120/120 performence would be in a real-world DAW?

[camsr]

Yes, but you can only calculate (approximate) stream numbers if you know the random read rates.
Then you need to know what your delivery bandwidth (Ie. firewire, usb2 or usb3) rate is.
Then take the lower of those two MegaBYTES-per-second (not megabits) rates and reduce by 1 megabyte per second for transactional overhead.
Then, divide the resultant MB/S by 0.55. That will give you the approximate number of 24-bit 96khz stereo streams you can actively channel from that device per second.
The 0.55 comes from 24-bit = 3 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits)
/ 1024 (kilobytes rate)
/ 1024 (megabytes rate)
* 2 (stereo)
* 96000 (96khz).

I never liked MB/Mb conversions

[zoobooboozoo]

Thx for the replies guys.

@metamorphosis: so how mnuch better would the segate 120/120 performence would be in a real-world DAW?

?

[Ashe37]

Thx for the replies guys.

@metamorphosis: so how mnuch better would the segate 120/120 performence would be in a real-world DAW?

Depends on your projects. You'd have to be playing back a lot of audio streams from it to get any difference.