Hi, I’m using Cubase LE with 2.8mhz desktop. I’ve heard it is best to use a separate drive to record on to. I can put in a second drive, but was also wondering if using a flash drive or sd card would work as well (the computer already has readers and I have media). Other than that the media will fill up faster, is there any reason not to do this? Thanks.

Flash drives are not as fast as hard drives so you won’t get satisfactory performance for audio recording.

I once tried recording a track directly into an external hard drive connected through USB 2.0, and it did not work, nor did a flashdrive. The recording kept getting interrupted since the speeds were very slow. I would start recording and it would cut off a few seconds into my recording.
My problems wasn’t solved until I switched from the USB connection to a full FireWire connection. Recording speeds are increased up to 33 times that of a USB 2.0 connection, making it ideal for recording to any other drive other than your computer hard drive (something you don’t want to do anyway).

OK, thanks. I thought for some reason flash drives were faster than hard drives because Vista can use a flash drive to speed performance (the “ReadyBoost” feature).

Also, since you mentioned firewire, I am struggling to decide weather to go with a usb mixer/interface like the Edirol m16-dx or a Presonus Firebox or other firewire type device. The Edirol seems to have huge bang for the buck (lots of inputs and output routing, can functions as midi control surface, live mixer, etc) but wonder about usb2 compared to firewire. My computer has both ports so that is not an issue. Would love to hear any thoughts & opinions about this.

Quality Flash is up to 100x faster than a typical Hard Drive when doing RANDOM I/O.  HD’s still excel when doing SEQUENTIAL I/O. 

Audio Recording is about as sequential as it can get… So, HDs win.

That said, there shouldn’t be an issue recording to a dedicated USB HD.  The I/O to a DEDICATED USB port is up to 480 Megabits per second (60 Megabytes per second.) Even accounting for sloppy overhead, that’s ample bandwidth for a few audio tracks.  I’ve done it successfully MANY times.  I’ve even recording Direct DVHD from an HD Camera to an external USB2.0 drive without problems.  But it MUST be a DEDICATED USB, with NOTHING else sharing it.  And to determine if this is the case, you have to be tech-savvy enough to understand what you’re looking at when you look at the resource usage in the System part of Control Panel.

As far as Firewire 1 versus USB2.0; they have close to the same upper limit of bandwidth: 400Mb/sec.  Firewire “2” (FW800) doubles that.  For Bandwidth Intensive applications, FW excels, though, because it’s more efficient.  To put it simply, the CPU must do more work on USB, while Firewire has dedicated hardware and is thus less load on the computer.

I have a 10-channel Audio device that runs on USB2.0 with absolutely no problem.  I had LOADS of problems with an equivalent FireWire box because FireWire seems to be MUCH more sensitive to differences in chipset providers and IRQ usage than USB....