mathieujm Posted March 18, 2008 Report Share Posted March 18, 2008 I record live 2 tracks with MS2008 (14) or Samp9SE on a laptop. I have some performance issues with labs from time to time. I think my laptop harddisk is part of the problem. As there are now 4gB USB2 key, it seems to be a viable alternative. Have you tried this ? Thanks Jean-Marie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sascha Posted March 18, 2008 Report Share Posted March 18, 2008 As far as I've monitored, writing to a key takes way more time than reading from it. So I would doubt if that's a real option. Additional problem: write cycles are limited. While most manufacturers state a few 100,000 or so, I wouldn't count on that. I wouldn't say these keys are a reliable medium either. My wife's got a cheap one that survived the maching machine without problems while a quite expensive one from my collection suddenly died out after 2 weeks of 'normal' usage. I'd go for an external laptop hd instead. While you should barely touch them when operating, they were generally build to last a few years as main storage devices. And they're fast, too. And don't forget about NTFS and such. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mathieujm Posted March 18, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 18, 2008 Thanks Sascha Yes reliability is a very important point, but I saw so much external HD dieing and myself I never had any problem with my sticks. Concerning the write time, I know it's longer than the read time, but I think it's always less than with HD ? But there are not a lot of informations about this on the net. I will try to record 1gb of disposable sound to see what happends. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sebastian.Gabler Posted March 18, 2008 Report Share Posted March 18, 2008 I am quite sure that current flash drives are more reliable than 1,8 or 2,5 SoHo harddisks. The number of cycles is well within the millions now, and firmware will balance the access times for each cluster. Latencies are not an issue for solid state drives. Only that a USB flash drive is maybe not so fast, as an internal SATA attached one. Internal flash drives have very good write rates with about 30MB/s (and that sutained, as they don't suffer from concurrent access). USB Sticks are slower. But I would dare to say that even those will suffice for 2track. /S Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mathieujm Posted March 18, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 18, 2008 Only that a USB flash drive is maybe not so fast, as an internal SATA attached one. Internal flash drives have very good write rates with about 30MB/s (and that sutained, as they don't suffer from concurrent access). USB Sticks are slower. But I would dare to say that even those will suffice for 2track. I saw some USB key reviews talking about average 5 MB/s writing rate but what seems to slow down this rate is the file creation, as USB key seems to be only FAT drives. I think this is not a real problemin my case ? Surely I will use a separate USB root hub to minimize the concurrent accesses. Jean-Marie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sebastian.Gabler Posted March 18, 2008 Report Share Posted March 18, 2008 Even 5MB/s would be plenty for Stereo recording. /S Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mathieujm Posted March 19, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 I tried yesterday and fill up an entire 512 Mb stick with no labs (when recording on the laptop HD I had 1 or 2 labs every 15mn at 24/44.1) And when the stick was full a message tell me to stop recording and all was OK. There is a remaining 16M of free space on the stick which is - I suppose - for the eventual closing files processes and the update of the VIP. Just have to try with the 2GB stick I will receive soon. Jean-Marie Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
martin armsby Posted March 19, 2008 Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 These new SD cards are much faster and the CF cards are even faster. I run the one in the picture on a USB adapter stick that is especially for SDHC and its great! http://support.magix.net/boards/samplitude...&pid=113341 Cheers M Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mathieujm Posted March 19, 2008 Author Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 These new SD cards are much faster and the CF cards are even faster.I run the one in the picture on a USB adapter stick that is especially for SDHC and its great! I didn't think of that solution. As I have a SD cart port on my laptop, i will try this solution. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonuli Posted March 19, 2008 Report Share Posted March 19, 2008 I can imagine that such a solution may be a workaround in a certain situation. However, I wonder why you don't fix the problems with your internal HD... Once I thought that using a USB stick would be a good idea to run a mobile XAMPP environment. I changed quickly to a small USB HD because it was so slow...! So I'm still convinced that any HD should do a better job. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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