So why is an external hard drive better?

[laboitenoire]

I have been recording at school for a few years now. Our setup would be considered unorthodox by practically every pro out there. At our school concerts, we split our board into 2 groups of 8 channels, and the direct out the first 8 into our computer. Now, we use one of the original USB 2.0 (gasp!) interfaces, and have never had to worry about latancy, because we're not monitoring the computer as we record. It gets the job done. The computer itself is a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 (the old socket 478 model), with maybe 512 megs of RAM (probably more like 256), and a 20 gig ATA-100 hard drive. Sure, we're always clearing off the hard drive before concerts, but we still can record a three-hour concert with 8 tracks at 44.1 KHz.

My friend/teacher who runs the club records at home by just going direct into his laptop soundcard. He writes his own stuff, and has recorded songs with over 24 tracks in them. His 5400 RPM laptop drive has never caused him popping or clicking issues.

So obviously, with harddrives, your mileage may vary.

 

[Jimtoonz]

So obviously, with harddrives, your mileage may vary.

Agreed. To a certain extent, you can predict the amount of data that you will need to shove down to the drive. Again, it's a matter of math:

Audio at 44.1kHz sampled at 16-bit depth:

44100 X 16 = 705600 bits streamed per second per channel

705600/8 (8 bits to the byte)= 88200 bytes/second

USB2.0 throughput(max)=60,000,000 bytes/sec.

60,000,000/88200 = 680(and change). This would be the theoretical maximum number of tracks of digital audio at 16/44.1 that you could move over USB 2.0.

One of the issues with USB is that it does not always make efficient use of the bandwidth. It utilizes polling of all the devices on the chain to control transmission and its overhead is substantial. In actual practice the throughput is considerably less than theoretical maximum(and all the numbers in my last post are exactly that). Even the boldest claims of USB vendors will not exceed 40MB/second. Also, remember that the USB bandwidth is shared by any other devices on the channel. All of this is worth remembering as you plan and build a DAW.

Also, note that higher sampling rates and bit depths grow the data stream in pretty dramatic fashion. We have already established 16/44.1 as 88,200 Bytes/second. Let's look at 24/96 which has been embraced by many for its higher quality and detail:

24 X 96,000 = 2,304,000 bits

2,304,000/8 (to get BYTES) = 288,000

For comparison, 288,000/88,200 = 3.27(rounded), so 24/96 requires 3.27 times the bandwidth per channel as compared to 16/44.1

 

[kevinmoore73]

Jimtoonz, I wish more people would come in to this thread and read your posts.

 

[adammazza]

The newer sata/esata protocols definitely seem more efficient then USB. If you want the best performance/protection you would want to go with RAID 1+0 (commonly referred to as RAID 10). But this requires a minimum of 4 drives . You get the protection of mirroring and the performance benefit of striping.

What I do is use cheap local storage for working with music files (or pictures in photoshop) and then archive everything to very cheap network storage. I have an old PC running OpenBSD which has a bunch of storage attached to it. It was very cheap to assemble and can be easily expanded.

Of course your next problem then becomes "What happens if my house goes up in flames" .

Adam

 

[maxiegrant]

I've been hearing alot that it's better to record to an external hard drive than the one in your computer.


??????why???????

Other than you can take it with you, which isn't a bad idea.

It's a spindle dedicated to receiving bits from your recording equipment. If it's busy keeping your OS operating, it's not going to be as fast responding to read-write requests from your ProTools or whatever.

Also, if you go high-end with an external drive, you can get one with a faster spindle, say 7800 RPM or even 10,000. This makes a huge difference in response time.

 

[didier]

I got an eSata drive for Xmas. Firewire was good enough for me, but this is fantastic.

 

[adammazza]

the only advantage is that it is safer from crashes. and you can disconect it and take it with you. performance wise, internal hardrives are better. (unless it's in a laptop that has a slower hard drive but i was compareing it to a desktop PC)

That's not really true. It depends on lots of factors. A desktop harddrive could be any RPM speed (5400,7200, 10000, even 15k in the case of SCSI drives) and could have a different amount of cache which makes a huge difference.

Of course you could add a second internal hard drive that is faster then your primary. I think the key is to have a dedicated drive for recording.

Adam

 

[bassace5]

For me, the main advantage to using an external hard drive is that it frees up processor speed on my laptop. If your working on several multi-track songs at once and you are working on a laptop, processor speed will sooner or later become an issue. Did for me anyway....so if I get bogged down I just dump stuff over to my external. Not to mention I use it to back up all of my work. So, as far as practical functionality is concerned an external hard drive has help me to free up needed space on my laptop. There are many other things it's nice to have an external HD for also. If I want to transfer a song, or a bunch of songs, or anything really...over to a buddies laptop, I just dump it in my HD, let him plug in and grab it. External HD has been most beneficial to me......I also store all my photos, itunes, etc...will really help free up a laptop.

 

[chrisp2u]

For me, the main advantage to using an external hard drive is that it frees up processor speed on my laptop. If your working on several multi-track songs at once and you are working on a laptop, processor speed will sooner or later become an issue. Did for me anyway....so if I get bogged down I just dump stuff over to my external.

This is only a benefit when using FW externals, and not USB from what I understand.
---
c

 

[seamonkey]

I got an eSata drive for Xmas. Firewire was good enough for me, but this is fantastic.

+1 on eSata
FW, USB all have a protocol overhead. eSata is just like another internal Sata drive.

 

[bassace5]

Quote:
Originally Posted by bassace5@comcas
For me, the main advantage to using an external hard drive is that it frees up processor speed on my laptop. If your working on several multi-track songs at once and you are working on a laptop, processor speed will sooner or later become an issue. Did for me anyway....so if I get bogged down I just dump stuff over to my external.
This is only a benefit when using FW externals, and not USB from what I understand.
---
c
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Actually, it frees up processor speed because I put whatever I am not working on at the moment over on the external, so my laptop is only dealing with what I am working on at the moment. Its not a question of what connection (firewire or usb) i use to get the stuff over to the external HD, its just a matter of freeing up my laptop. In this respect, an external HD is very beneficial to me because I tend to be working on many different songs at once....and it's nice to be able to dump something I dont need onto the HD, and go back and get it when I need it.

 

[msquared]

...or, to quote PC World magazine in a recent article :
"External hard drives aren't as fast as internal models, but they are great for backups and are easy to install."

That was a great post until you started quoting PC World.

 

[DocBop]

That was a great post until you started quoting PC World.

The details is the drives can be of equal spindle speed, but its the interface speed that is controlling/throttling thru-put. In past for fast external you used SCSI these day things are moving to SATA.

As this thread points out there are a lot factors in speed of one drive versus another.

To the original question I would say the answer isn't that the drive is external, what is important is having separate OS and data hard drives. If second drive is external then speed of the interface is most important factor, then spindle speed and cache.

 

[Jimtoonz]

That was a great post until you started quoting PC World.

Thanks. I learned long ago that I can tend to be wordy, in that I like for people to understand some of the "nuts and bolts" of the gear they are using. The thing is, some people want a "one-line" version of the story. I put it at the end, so that someone would(at least) have to skim the entire content before finding it.