How many audio track on a USB2 drive?

[lkingston]

I have a laptop with two drives: a 500GB 5400 RPM internal drive for the system, and a 320GB 7200 RPM drive for streaming RTAS instrument samples. What I'm wondering is how many audio tracks I can use off an external USB2 drive? All I usually do is a vocal track or two and some guitar as audio tracks. That's maybe three or four tracks of non VI audio on an average track. How many audio tracks will an average USB hard drive handle? No VI sample streaming. Just plain multitrack audio.

[Dism]

Originally Posted by lkingston

I have a laptop with two drives: a 500GB 5400 RPM internal drive for the system, and a 320GB 7200 RPM drive for streaming RTAS instrument samples. What I'm wondering is how many audio tracks I can use off an external USB2 drive? All I usually do is a vocal track or two and some guitar as audio tracks. That's maybe three or four tracks of non VI audio on an average track. How many audio tracks will an average USB hard drive handle? No VI sample streaming. Just plain multitrack audio.

USB drives are not supported. FireWire or eSata only.

[browniespeaks]

While most know its not suppoerted most also know in a pinch a usb drive will work for low track count non punch recording. It will not be stable. It will eventually fail but why not try it youself and se how many fairly stable tracks you can record to You're drive. I know there have been field sessions I've been at that have run 6 hours over I was out of drive space and had to use sd cards and my android phone as a hard drive to record. The client was told the situation and chose to continue. I made my money and everything was ok. I know its not the norm and is not supportex but it also saved the day.

[lkingston]

There are many times when the arrangement is all virtual instruments where all you need is a lead vocal, a background vocal, and a guitar part. If the large instrument samples are streaming off a fast drive, I can't see any reason why I couldn't do a couple of audio tracks off a USB drive. I do video editing off USB drives all the time and that works fine. A typical video project with two streams of video plus a music bed and a narration voice over work just fine on a USB drive. It seems to me like a couple of tracks of audio would be far less throughput than that.

[Dism]

Originally Posted by lkingston

There are many times when the arrangement is all virtual instruments where all you need is a lead vocal, a background vocal, and a guitar part. If the large instrument samples are streaming off a fast drive, I can't see any reason why I couldn't do a couple of audio tracks off a USB drive. I do video editing off USB drives all the time and that works fine. A typical video project with two streams of video plus a music bed and a narration voice over work just fine on a USB drive. It seems to me like a couple of tracks of audio would be far less throughput than that.

It really depends on the resolution of both the video and the audio. If you were streaming HD video at 1080p... you'd notice a HUGE difference in performance between USB and FireWire. The reason being is that USB sends data in bursts that can vary a lot in bandwidth, whereas FireWire is far more consistant. For streaming, it is for this reason why USB is not recommended. Of course you can squeeze a few tracks through... hence why an MBox does the job fine through USB 1.1. But we're talking a max of 2 tracks at 48/24. With 2.0... you could probably get maybe a dozen going without much drama, but any more than that is just asking for trouble.

USB is ok in a pinch when you have no other option... but given the choice, go FireWire and you will save a lot of hassle.

[scenicrecords]

Originally Posted by Dism

It really depends on the resolution of both the video and the audio. If you were streaming HD video at 1080p... you'd notice a HUGE difference in performance between USB and FireWire. The reason being is that USB sends data in bursts that can vary a lot in bandwidth, whereas FireWire is far more consistant. For streaming, it is for this reason why USB is not recommended. Of course you can squeeze a few tracks through... hence why an MBox does the job fine through USB 1.1. But we're talking a max of 2 tracks at 48/24. With 2.0... you could probably get maybe a dozen going without much drama, but any more than that is just asking for trouble.

USB is ok in a pinch when you have no other option... but given the choice, go FireWire and you will save a lot of hassle.

+1

Had nothing but trouble with my Glyph Drive connected either USB or eSATA. Once I got the Digi-Approved SIIG FW Card and connected via Firewire, all is well. Try it as an experiment, but don't expect consistency.

[lkingston]

One thing that might help in my case is that I have 8GB of RAM, so there's going to be a lot of caching going on between the bursts. I have both firewire and eSata ports on my laptop so I do have options.