Recording to am external USB hard drive

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john12ax7

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Oct 15, 2010
Messages
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Location
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Looking for a way to work on sessions at two different studios. Was wondering if it's practical to record directly on an external drive,  was thinking of using USB 3 with either an SSD or regular 7200 in an enclosure.

I'm using Pro Tools on Windows 7 PC. Have used a dedicated internal drive until now.
 
I knew people used firewire and thunderbolt regularly. My concern was all the other things hanging on the USB bus the computer needs to deal with possibly causing conflicts.

But it's good to know if can work.
 
It may well be the case on PC, I just don't have the recording experience to know.

I've said here before it takes more effort to keep my one Win 7 PC on the bench running than it does my households other 8 Apple devices put together…  but that might say more about me than the platform,
 
ruairioflaherty said:
It may well be the case on PC, I just don't have the recording experience to know.

I've said here before it takes more effort to keep my one Win 7 PC on the bench running than it does my households other 8 Apple devices put together…  but that might say more about me than the platform,

Might just be a familiarity issue. I am very familiar with Windows and minus crashing 2 times due to random memory leaks, and crashing due to un plugging a usb audio interface, my windows 7 install never crashes. It's well tuned and I am familiar with it. I  have had the same install for 4 years now. But if you put me in front of a mac.....well I can barely use the thing.  ;D
 
I record to an external SSD through USB3 for a good few years now. Samples and DAW resources are also on external SSDs. It seems to keep the load on the main drive down.

The OP is right that the USB bus can be an issue. A good quality and reliable powered hub becomes really important.

The RME UFX interface series lets us record directly to a USB device straight off the interface. Other interfaces may offer that too.

A good backup system, especially when on the move is just as important. This may lead you to backing up to Dropbox, which could be doubly useful if you are on more than one location. With Drobox linked to your other location, there would be no need to take physical drives.
 

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