USB Flash Drive for Audio Storage

[Rainyone]

I was unable to locate any info on digidesigns web site about using USB flash drive for Audio Storage.

I would like to know if anyone has used a USB flash drive to store audio recordings using an Mbox2 , Pro Tools 7.3 LE. If so, how well does it work.

I am tired of lugging the 320 gig external hard drive and would prefer to record direct to a 4 gig USB flash drive. Since my laptop comes equipped with 4 USB ports, it would be a lot easier to transfer from the flash drive to the external drive at home.

I am Using WinXP Media Center Addtion w/sp2 and Pro Tools LE 7.3 version.


Just tryin to lighten my load.

[sunburst79]

I haven't tried to record to a Flash Drive, I have sucessfully bounced a 2 track mP3 mix onto one to take to a buddies house.

Being that is a USB flash drive you could run into all of the problems that people run into using external USB drives.

Or not...Most of the USB drive problems are (I suspect) due more to incompatibilties of the USB to IDE/SATA chipset than the actual data transfer rate - this assuming its not a huge complex session.

You should certainly be able to back up a session to a USB flash drive. Performing realtime Protools operations on it may not work.

Post back with you results!

[Rainyone]

I have an update here;

For Windows XP Users;

NTFS and FAT tables

I want to use a USB Flash drive instead of a 320gig WD Notebook USB/Firewire External Harddrive (NTFS) to record live sessions. Then transfer my session's files to the External Harddrive. The less I have to lug around, the better off I will be.

It appears to be possible to store audio info to the USB Flashdrive. PT LE 7.31 will only store data that is being recorded to a drive with NTFS format on an XP system. I own a Scandisk cruzer Micro 2 gig flash drive. The File allocation table is FAT not NTFS. There are 2 ways you can pursue. One is to convert the FAT to NTFS without losing any Data on the flashdrive, or you can reformat the flash drive as an NTFS storage device. There are a few more things you will need to tweak if you do pursue this.

At this posting, I have not changed anything on my Flash Drive yet. If anyone wants to pursue this matter before I try this myself, Here is a Website that will discuss the issues of formatting and or converting a Flash Drive and/or USB external hard drive to NTFS. This site has other links for more info;

http://www.recalibrate.net/blog/2006...movable-media/

If you are not an experienced Windows user, then I recommend you don't try this.

Gateway laptop 945GT Express ChipsetIntel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7200 @ 2.00GHz 2gigs Memory
4 usb ports, 1 firewire (4pin) port.

[epu]

Hey. I tried this and it doesn't work. I just purchased the SanDisk Micro Cruzer 4GB version. You <b>can</b> reformat the drive to NTFS, but PTLE only sees it as a Transfer volume. It won't allow you to change it's designation to P or R.

[sunburst79]

You may want to uninstall the U3 partition if you haven't already done so. The U3 luancher shows up as a seperate partition in Windows Explorer and cannot be deleted or reformatted in Disk Management console. The U3 partition will also keep you from using the thumb drive as a bootable volume. If you want to remove the U3 partition follow this link U3 Uninstaller. While I can't say for sure that the U3 partition is the culprit it would be my first quess.

Be aware that the U3 uninstall is a one way trip though.

I've run the U3 removal.EXE on my system with no ill results FWIW.