External Hard Drive: USB or FIREWIRE?

[moya83]

I'm operating PT10 and using an 500GB USB external hard drive. Is a USB fine or would you consider firewire? What is the difference between the usb and firewire external hard drive when using PT10?

[Meads]

The firewire bus is a lot faster, than USB. It's recommended by Avid, to use firewire hdds.

On the other hand, I have been using USB sometimes, when there was no other option, and I never had troubles with it. So if it works for you, I'd say there's no need to get a new hard drive.
If at some point you'll run into "disk too fragmented" or similar errors, you'll know what's causing it, and then you might consider switching to firewire.

[WernerF]

Hard drives are cheap. You can get a 500 gig FireWire drive for a little over a hundred bucks. Any kind of heavy track count on the USB drive is gonna be a problem sooner or later so why take a chance.

[moya83]

(Damn)....ok thanks, I appreciate the help!

[musicman691]

A USB 2.0 drive can be fast enough ONLY if it's the ONLY thing on that USB chain. Start daisy-chaining stuff on that same chain and your throughput will go south and fast.

[KRAFT]

Stick with firewire if at all possible. Firewire is faster and safer when you get into any amount of tracks. Why take a chance to lose that one great take. I also see that Thunderbolt drives are coming out but quite pricey.

[Bill Denton]

At least as important as the interface type is the drive speed.

Many USB drives are only 5400 RPM, which isn't good, and many of them are also "green" drives, which causes all kinds of glitches.

For a Mac, Firewire or Thunderbolt is best, while for Windows 7 USB is recommended.

Make sure you've got a non-"green" 7200 RPM drive and you'll be in good shape...

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Bill Denton

At least as important as the interface type is the drive speed.

Many USB drives are only 5400 RPM, which isn't good, and many of them are also "green" drives, which causes all kinds of glitches.

For a Mac, Firewire or Thunderbolt is best, while for Windows 7 USB is recommended.

Make sure you've got a non-"green" 7200 RPM drive and you'll be in good shape...

Another thing to watch out for are some drives like some Lacie external drives will power down even if you have it set otherwise in your computer to not spin down. These are not specified as 'green' drives either; got one that drives me nuts like that (and my Mac is set to not spin down drives).

[nst7]

If you have one of the new Macs with USB 3.0, that will work good also, better than 2.0.

[VRW]

I had been using 2 external USB2.0 7200rpm HDs for about 2 years with PT9+10 and it definitely worked. The reason for me to do it was that I had an iMac with only 1 Firewire port which got connected to my Digi003R and I didn´t trust in the FW daisychaining as it was hard enough to keep the 003R running without problems. The 2 USB HDs each used a seperate USB port on the iMac and by spreading the audio files to both HDs it just worked well also with a larger amount of tracks in a session. However a crucial thing is the speed of the HDs-you won´t use HDs lower than 7200rpm! Considering that USB2.0 can actually work too.
A few weeks ago I decided to try the FW daisy chaining, just out of curiosity (and as I by chance had read several threads here about it at that time). And at the very first start I had exactly those problems described here in the DUC-the 003R didn´t show up as an audio device in PT anymore. Without the HDs it did, with the HDs daisy chained (iMac-HD1-HD2-Digi003R) it did not. Well, finally, after trying to change several connections, the order of the connections etc. anytime then it just started working and it still does. And it really does sound cleaner and wider, just a bit better than with the USB connections. So I will leave it this way now.
What I wanted to say was that if you can get it work via FW, it´s better anyway. If you have too less FW ports on your PC or just can´t get it work properly, you can even use USB2.0 HDs as long as it is 7200rpm fast and it´s connected each to a seperate USB port!
However this whole story is just for people who´s opportunities are limited as are mine. If you have one of the newer PC generations there ain´t any problems. The new iMacs e.g. have more than 1 FW port as well as Thunderbolt. That´s just cool indeed. And if you use a desktop you can buy an extra FW card of course.
Good luck to everybody, have fun!
Cheers, VRW