The voice of reason is always welcomed mandolarian.....even though I don't always listenmandolarian wrote:Not to rain on your USB parade of peripherals. But why in bandwidth's name would you want a USB mouse & keyboard when you have PS2 connectors going hungry?
Running audio on USB and moving data to/from the USB hard drive is playing very close to the edge of Pop and Click city. Not surprised you can only run 4 devices. That pipe is full. Sure, USB 2.0 promises 480 megabits dancing down the wire. But that's a max amount, on the salt flats, with a tailwind. With overhead and retries and less than perfect drivers, it's popity-pop-click. The USB protocol was never meant for really time-critical stuff like multi-channel audio. It amazes me it can work at all.
So if you have other hard drive options, you might want to consider them before you get into some heavy tracking traffic.
My 2cents.
.Valuable opinion and it makes sense, however:
External keyboard and mouse - comfort. It's important (for me) when doing a lot of key presses, especially for someone who has suffered with carpal tunnel etc. (surgery and the whole works). Of course, I can work with the notebook keyboard if need be, but the mouse....I really want to have a mouse.
As for having PS/2 slots.....nope....none.
I have considered a serial mouse.
Do the mouse and keyboard really eat up much bandwidth? I didn't think they did. But I know it all adds up and maybe more so than I thought.
As for the USB drive: I only hooked it up after having problems. I originally started with just the internal.
And so.....the pops and clicks were occurring with no USB HD and no external keyboard and mouse. I thought of them first and disconnected them.....it made no difference.
mandolarian, I have a question. Is firewire better than USB 2.0 even though the "specs" for USB 2.0 indicate similar performance?
Here's another question: I saw a powered USB 2.0 hub that also had Firwire. That is, it connected through USB 2.0 but had 4 USB 2.0 inputs and 4 Firewire inputs. Any toughts on a funky setup like that (just curious)?
