A quick Q about back up drives and USB hubs

[kchandlermusic]

I did search as much as I could before posting to not add (newb) brick-a-brack.

Currently I use a Glyph GPT 50 2TB for back up and storage. What, if any, difference would there be between using that drive or WD Passport drive of the same or larger storage size?

Due to outboard USB equipment, I am out of USB ports of my MacBook Pro (2xUSB, 1xThunderbolt, 1xFireWire). Would a USB port mess me up in anyway or slow anything down causing error or latency?

Thank you in advance!

[Darryl Ramm]

What exact drive are you comparing to? Many (Most?) WD Passport drives are low-priced slow junk aimed at clueless consumers (if they were targeting smarter purchasers they would start by specing the drive RPM clearly). Even as backup drives I could not imagine wanting to deal with anything less than a 7200 rpm drive.

Why is the Glyph not working OK? (Having one backup drive is never a good idea, the time you find you need to recover from a backup may be when the write of a new backup fails and you then have a corrupted primary and corrupted backup and up **** creek.).

As for hubs etc. I'm maybe not following the question. While you are doing a backup you should not be doing anything else in that computer. When not doing a backup you should probably detach the backup disk from the computer, and store it somewhere safe, you certainly should not leave it mounted on the computer and at risk of finger/stupid user damage. (backups usually protect against user mistakes, software issues, theft, hardware failure, building failures, somewhat in that order). So if you need to you can just plug the backup drive into wherever your have other stuff connected for normal use when you use it. Or worse case if you have a USB 3 hub then it won't slow down the backup in any way you'll notice. If you need to backup the already external drive if you are using that as a session drive then sure a Hub may be needed.

But what exact MacBook Pro... your best options may be to record to the internal SSD drive and backup to the Glyph you have already. In terms of reliability external audio drives are probalby not great on portable conputers that get moved around.

[kchandlermusic]

Thank you!

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by kchandlermusic

I did search as much as I could before posting to not add (newb) brick-a-brack.

Currently I use a Glyph GPT 50 2TB for back up and storage. What, if any, difference would there be between using that drive or WD Passport drive of the same or larger storage size?

Due to outboard USB equipment, I am out of USB ports of my MacBook Pro (2xUSB, 1xThunderbolt, 1xFireWire). Would a USB port mess me up in anyway or slow anything down causing error or latency?

Thank you in advance!

Why aren't you using the FW800 ports on the GPT50? I have that exact same drive (actually two of them) and the FW800 ports work just fine. You can daisy chain from one GPT50 to another FW800 drive. Drive size doesn't matter; you can go from a 2 TB drive to a 4 TB drive.

As to also using a USB drive that depends on what exact drive? If USB3 it'll be faster connection protocol but a lot of performance will depend on what exact physical drive is inside the drive case. Glyph uses Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm spinners in those GPT50's and who knows what WD has in theirs speed-wise. Either way around it won't so much be the connection protocol used as what's inside the case. Put a spinner on a fast connection won't necessarily get you more throughput.