cheddatom Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 My mixing and recording set ups are several miles apart. At the moment, I carry my PC to and fro. I'd like to stop doing this, but what's the best solution. An external drive? Can I record 16 channels at a time onto a USB drive? I have another computer I could use at one location see. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatback Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 (edited) [quote name='cheddatom' post='739809' date='Feb 9 2010, 11:25 AM']My mixing and recording set ups are several miles apart. At the moment, I carry my PC to and fro. I'd like to stop doing this, but what's the best solution. An external drive? Can I record 16 channels at a time onto a USB drive? I have another computer I could use at one location see.[/quote] USB 2 might be OK, but for multiple tracks and / or high bitrates, firewire is better. If you've already got a USB drive, you could just buy a firewire enclosure and ransfer the drive into it. Presumably you have firewire on both PCs, if not you'd need to install firewire cards, cheap and no problem. As i said, USB might work for you anyway. Moving between two PCs should work fine. Obviously you'll need the same software on both and you'll need to make sutre you keep the project files as well as the audio files on the external hdd. Edited February 9, 2010 by fatback Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 9, 2010 Author Share Posted February 9, 2010 Yeh I have no problem with moving between PCs, it's just the speed of the thing really. At home I regularly transfer between the two machines, but I just copy to the local drives before I start working, as I assume it's going to crash if I try working from USB. I didn't realise you could get firewire drives. I shall investigate, ta! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatback Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 [quote name='cheddatom' post='739878' date='Feb 9 2010, 12:28 PM']Yeh I have no problem with moving between PCs, it's just the speed of the thing really. At home I regularly transfer between the two machines, but I just copy to the local drives before I start working, as I assume it's going to crash if I try working from USB. I didn't realise you could get firewire drives. I shall investigate, ta![/quote] The problem isn't so much crashing as glitching and driopouts and stutters and all that nastiness. Which is why the number of tracks and bit rate are the things that matter. Fewer tracks at higher rate/more tracks at lower rate for a given amount of glitching. Drive speed matters too. If you want to record large numbers of racks at high quality, a 10,000rpm drive is a gift. Not cheap, but not too dear either. But most standard 7200rpm drives are ok in normal use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 9, 2010 Author Share Posted February 9, 2010 Can USB 2 give me the full potential of a 7200RPM drive? Is there a way to see if i've recorded with glitches or not? (Cubase SX3) I generally record at 48K 16bit but I know that's probably frowned upon these days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flyfisher Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 [quote name='cheddatom' post='739878' date='Feb 9 2010, 12:28 PM']I didn't realise you could get firewire drives. I shall investigate, ta![/quote] I've got external LaCie firewire drives that I use for digital video (DV) editing. Some have triple interfaces: USB2, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. My understanding is that Firewire (400 Mbps) - although nominally slower than USB2 (480 Mbps) - supports faster sustained data rates than USB2 because of the drivers. This is obviously important with video and, I presume, is much the same with audio. 7200rpm drives are fine for DV. If you're going to splash out on 10,000rpm drives then besure that your PC I/O and drivers can make full use of the extra speed or you're just wasting your money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatback Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 (edited) There are far more technically knowleedgable folks than me on the forum, but as I understand it, usb 2 is in fact a little faster than Firewire, but firewire is much better at traffic management, much more likely to keep things in synch etc. USB2 with a 7,200 rpm drive will work fine until you hit too many tracks or too high a rate. Try it. [quote]I generally record at 48K 16bit but I know that's probably frowned upon these days.[/quote] That should be fine unless you process the data a lot. Every time you add an effect, say, to a track you add digital errors, so the higher the bit rate the better. But if you don't go crazy, there shouldn't be a problem. It's a way better quality than than we had in the past, that's for sure. In Cubase and/or your audio card software, you'll be able to set a latency value and see an error count. You want the errors, obviously, at zero. Latency shouldn't matter too much unless you're using vsti instruments (if I understand right). Hopefully some proper sound bodz will confirm or not what I'm saying. Edited February 9, 2010 by fatback Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 9, 2010 Author Share Posted February 9, 2010 I have the latency set to 0 at the moment for little projects at home where we need to monitor from the computer. I should change that before recording proper audio. I'll look into a firewire drive. I found a firewire card the other day, which is convinient. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tauzero Posted February 9, 2010 Share Posted February 9, 2010 What about SCSI? Some SCSI cards have external connectors, and SCSI is the drive type of choice for studio work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 9, 2010 Author Share Posted February 9, 2010 Really? I thought SCSI went out with Mini discs? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatback Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 (edited) SATA is just the latest version of scsi. For setting up a cheap media editing system with high speed drives, the old scsi-2 is still a useful option. You can sometimes get 10,000 rpm scsi drives cheaply, and a wide-scsi adapter is cheap too. I've gone that route for broadcast video, where access speeds are critical, but it's overkill for audio imo. Also, scsi drives are relatively low capacity compared to modern SATA. If you're buying a SATA drive for audio, google the reviews. You'll find some are better than others. Just make sure you always have your recorded tracks backed up onto a second drive. Drives fail sooner or later. Edited February 10, 2010 by fatback Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dubs Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 Best practise would be to work locally and then beackup externally at the end of each session... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 10, 2010 Author Share Posted February 10, 2010 So maybe just carry on the way I am, as in use an external HD to transfer from one computer to another, and always copy to the local drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bumfrog Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 [quote name='fatback' post='740971' date='Feb 10 2010, 01:41 PM']SATA is just the latest version of scsi. For setting up a cheap media editing system with high speed drives, the old scsi-2 is still a useful option. You can sometimes get 10,000 rpm scsi drives cheaply, and a wide-scsi adapter is cheap too. I've gone that route for broadcast video, where access speeds are critical, but it's overkill for audio imo. Also, scsi drives are relatively low capacity compared to modern SATA. If you're buying a SATA drive for audio, google the reviews. You'll find some are better than others. Just make sure you always have your recorded tracks backed up onto a second drive. Drives fail sooner or later.[/quote] /nerd mode on/ actually, SAS is the latest version of SCSI /nerd mode off/ to the op, I'd try looking for drives that can do esata as that will effectively give you the same connection that you have in the pc so you'll get the proper sustained data rates. Quite a lot of new laptops are coming with esata ports as standard. You will however need esata compatible units at either end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 10, 2010 Author Share Posted February 10, 2010 It seems you need PCI express to get an esata card which can give the most out of an esata drive. I'm learning a lot today! Like how old and useless my PCs are. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bumfrog Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 (edited) [quote name='cheddatom' post='741100' date='Feb 10 2010, 03:08 PM']It seems you need PCI express to get an esata card which can give the most out of an esata drive. I'm learning a lot today! Like how old and useless my PCs are.[/quote] you can get standard pci cards that are sata controllers with esata ports on them If the esata thing doesn't float your boat, then I'd echo what other people have said about firewire being better as it's peer to peer based and can negotiate data transfer a lot more efficiently between devices. They way you're currently doing it is exactly what I would do if I were using usb drives though. It's just that it will take time to copy from the local pc to the usb drive and vice versa. Edited February 10, 2010 by bumfrog Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 10, 2010 Author Share Posted February 10, 2010 the standard PCI cards run at half the speed of the PCI express ones. I'm not sure what all the different data rates are. Is sata through a standard PCI card still faster than IDE? USB? USB 2? Firewire? Thanks for all the help by the way Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bumfrog Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 [quote name='cheddatom' post='741119' date='Feb 10 2010, 03:38 PM']the standard PCI cards run at half the speed of the PCI express ones. I'm not sure what all the different data rates are. Is sata through a standard PCI card still faster than IDE? USB? USB 2? Firewire? Thanks for all the help by the way [/quote] It's not so much the speed, although iirc yes, pci, it's still faster than usb, it's the sustained data rate that's important if you are planning to record directly on to an external drive, hence why firewire is better than usb. just checked and pci can do up to 133MB/s where as usb 2.0 is only about 40MB/s ish.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 10, 2010 Author Share Posted February 10, 2010 Heh, OK (I think PCIx was 300MB/s) in that case it's deffinitely a good option. You can get the cards for £15 each, so two of them and a beast of an esata drive could be the solution. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rimskidog Posted February 10, 2010 Share Posted February 10, 2010 As stated above firewire is better than usb2 for this. I'm no techie but understand that is because usb2 transfers data in packets, firewire streams continuously. In addition you are less likely to get problems if you use the local drive for system and the firewire drive for the audio. If you get to anything like a decent track count the bus wont cope with both the system and the streamed audio. This means you should not transfer audio onto the system drive as suggested. As a slight aside, if you are using protools you must be very careful what firewire drive you buy. Check on the DUC for chipset compatibility. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheddatom Posted February 11, 2010 Author Share Posted February 11, 2010 I'm using Cubase. I have my OS on a seperate drive anyway ta. So, esata or firewire. Price shall decide! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bumfrog Posted February 11, 2010 Share Posted February 11, 2010 [quote name='cheddatom' post='741726' date='Feb 11 2010, 08:48 AM']So, esata or firewire. Price shall decide![/quote] cue harry hill fight sequence Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatback Posted February 11, 2010 Share Posted February 11, 2010 [quote name='bumfrog' post='741079' date='Feb 10 2010, 02:49 PM']/nerd mode on/ actually, SAS is the latest version of SCSI /nerd mode off/[/quote] ok [i]a [/i] later version honestly, i'd be surprised if a usb2 or firewire external hdd didn't work fine for you. Try recording to tyhe external and try just using the external to copy. It won;t be a big problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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