External audio drive: USB 2 or firewire?

Nisse · Post by **Nisse** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 4:04 pm

Hi Scopers.

Im thinking of buying an external harddrive for audio recording purposes. For some reason every time I hear of anyone using such a device, its always a firewire drive.
Is there anything that makes firewire drives more suitable for this purpose than a USB 2 drive?

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Sat Jul 31, 2004 4:45 am

In my experience it depends more on the quality of your firewire or USB2 controller in your computer. My advice is to get a drive that supports both protocols (Lacie has some like this which are very nice) and see which one works best for you.

sonolive · Post by **sonolive** » Sat Jul 31, 2004 5:33 am

hi,
personally, i prefer FIRE WIRE 1394 concept.
1394 is a real network (with IP protocol) instead of USB that is a bus working with concentrators ...
Fire wire do not need drivers (under XP) while USB2 may have drivers (good ones) installed for each HD ...

Fire wire let you build a network between your differents PC including the external HD ... a network at 400 Mb/s ! it's fantastic in a setup using several machines (backups, , video, audio ...)

that's only my experience speaking here

a+++
olive

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sat Jul 31, 2004 6:59 am

imho you should examine the chipset/drivers issue with both controller types very carefully.
There are almost no disks with a native FW or USB2 controller mounted on the disk, so all common stuff uses some bridging to IDE.
This WILL affect performance and reliability.
I recently made a FW copy of some important data to oblivion and I'm unable to recover (obviously driver related).
Kimgr mentioned that in the majority of cases in which his customers had disk trouble a FW drive was involved.
Of course the 'wild' unmounting by just pulling the cable is the most widespread error, but one never knows.
I sometimes wish the old SCSI days back...

cheers, Tom

marcuspocus · Post by **marcuspocus** » Sun Aug 01, 2004 3:02 am

My knowledge in these area are limited but from what i know, the main difference (except speed, or driver qualities) is that USB need CPU resource to work, while firewire doesn't. A bit like IDE/SCSI differences.

So, if the ext drive is used to record audio on, firewire would be taking less resource, and be more stable than USB.

If it's only for backuping, using USB or Firewire wouldn't really matter.

Liquid EDGE · Post by **Liquid EDGE** » Thu Aug 05, 2004 3:25 pm

isn't usb 2 slightly faster then firewire, plus with the mega fast cpu's of today who gives a shit if the usb uses slightly more resources.

to be honest i reckon it doesn't really matter, flick a coin.

also yeah in my experiance you can't do back ups ghost style with external hard drives they just don't seem to have drivers to work in/for dos. you just have to do it in windows with something like simple back up. i personally ghost my internall hardrives and simple my external. i'm starting to rant so i'll shut up..

_________________
http://www.mutationrecords.co.uk

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Liquid EDGE on 2004-08-05 16:30 ]</font>

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Thu Aug 05, 2004 5:11 pm

On 2004-08-05 16:25, Liquid EDGE wrote:
... plus with the mega fast cpu's of today who gives a shit if the usb uses slightly more resources...

it's not the cycles, but the interupts it generates...

a scsi controller could (can) do it's job totally independent from the OS (with a proper driver and if properly programmed)

cheers, Tom