Recording audio on an external USB drive.

[Grizzellda]

Is anyone doing this? I have been looking at USB drives and they seem to be up for it, but I have not used one to record audio.

Current speeds around 5 gigs a second. That should be enough!

But I think they are used mainly for back-up.

[uOpt]

"enternal"?

Do you mean internal or external?

External is crap because of the risk of random disconnects.

[Grizzellda]

I meant an external drive, yes, one that is connected by a USB cable. They are more than fast enuff to record audio, I think!

[BertKoor]

Current speeds around 5 gigs a second.

What they don't say is that it may take like 10 seconds before writing of the first millisecond is actually done.

I've worked with hardware mixing consoles which had an USB connector to record whatever went through it. I'm pretty sure that thing had a huge internal buffer for safety, and dumping data to USB was a low-priority background process.

But I think they are used mainly for back-up.

Word.

[Grizzellda]

So you are saying this is not worth trying?

Well I am gonna try it anyhow, but just wanted to ask on KVR. My modest audio interface has USB and seems to have no issues handling a few audio tracks.

[lfm]

I meant an external drive, yes, one that is connected by a USB cable. They are more than fast enuff to record audio, I think!

Talking to RME about the Digiface USB I got they meant that was more than capable on USB 2.0 even
- 4 x16 channels both in and outs together, at 96k half of that

HDD based usb 3 drives I have a couple, and those stay about 1 Gbps write speed.
- so SSD ones if 5 timed that seems good enough if not only theoretical
- as allocation table become more scattered probably much less, certain writes takes longer

One channel 48k/64bitfloat is roughly about 4 Mbps or so.

[Grizzellda]

Thank you for your reply.

I am going to try this, but I feel the way to go is record to SSD, or even a good ol' mechanical drive, and back up on the USB drive.

[glokraw]

So you are saying this is not worth trying?

Well I am gonna try it anyhow, but just wanted to ask on KVR. My modest audio interface has USB and seems to have no issues handling a few audio tracks.

I have all my audio tools and OS on a usb drive, with AVLinux distro as the OS. But my audio interface is PCI, which is a better bus for recording than usb. Computer is old, with an i7 cpu and 8 gig ram. No problems recording. Reminds me I need to pick up another old pci based computer as a spare. I have an extra e-mu 0404 pci soundcard at the ready

[Grizzellda]

Thanks guys, appreciate your comments.