Producing Music via External Harddrive

[tekboi]

I have an iMac that i'm using as my computer for music production. The problem I have is that there is simply NOT enough space on the installed harddrive to hold all of my samples. The standard external harddrives like they are not built for me to use it as I would an internal drive. I basically need a drive that I can store reason refills and samples on. Then load them into projects and work with them.

Would this work better with Firewire External HD's because of the faster transfer speeds?

 

[UNORTHODOX]

no clue, Dream Police or someone should be stopping in pretty soon though!

 

[thedreampolice]

For most of what is done for hip hop production any external drive would work. Glyph stuff is by far the best, and USB 2 is faster than firwire 400, but firewire 800 of course is faster if you have a firewire 800 port on your computer. Most newer imacs do.

 

[tekboi]

The Glyphs look like a DEAL. But, man those fuckers are expensive. I'm definitely going firewire 800 since mac doesn't have usb 3.0 yet.

I haven't used USB3 Yet. I hear its hella fast though.

 

[Shonsteez]

USB 2 is faster than firwire 400

Is this correct? I never heard that before.

 

[dacalion]

kinda but who's gonna debate dp? lmao

The maximum speed of USB2 at 480M/Sec is a little quicker than Firewire 400 (IEEE.1394a) which runs at 400 M/Sec (hence the "400" bit of the name).
In tests, however, FireWire 400 delivers a higher sustained transfer speed. Benchmarks suggest that hard drives connected with FireWire will copy information considerably faster than they would using USB 2.0.
To achieve higher performance, FireWire requires additional circuitry in supported devices. This often makes FireWire more expensive than USB 2.0.
Firewire 800 (IEEE.1394b) as the names suggests, has a peak speed of almost 800 M/Sec.
Used primarily by PC musicians for recording and transferring multichannel audio at high sample rates and for digital video cameras and decks.

 

[thedreampolice]

ha ha here are the raw specs

USB 2.0 is a 480 Mbps
FireWire 400 is well 400 Mbps ha ha

now that being said it can be deceiving because the throughput on firewire is usually better, so for the video guys firewire is still the only option.

Sorry if that was unclear on my part

So from a pure spec perspective USB 2 is faster, but from a real world running tests etc you can usually get a bit better performance from FW because Firewire is more of a peer to peer type connection where USB is master slave. My point was that both should work fine. Again sorry if I did not explain it well enough before. Does that make more sense?

 

[LouBez]

Its a good idea to get an external drive that runs at a high rpm too.

 

[thedreampolice]

RPM is good but, the bottleneck is the interface in this case.

 

[OnQ]

I just got a Glyph... So sick. DP thanks for the heads up on them.