Been Trying SONAR with a USB 3.0 Flash Drive

Psychobillybob
 
 
You missed the part about running a real studio vs recording as a hobby..."mobile studio" sure run all the USB2/3 all you want thats fine out of a van or form the side of stage somewhere, not gonna work sending it to a mastering house or as an industry standard.

 
Of course if you make the wrong assumptions, you will come to the wrong conclusions.
 

And yes my axe with Craig is his general lack of credentials in anything like recent studio work, it shows up in post like this, and there's always a few fanboys to defend his general lack of actual current studio credibility, go figure,

 
I just mastered the album "Trigger" for Bryan Ferry's lead guitarist. I won an award for one of the classical recordings I did a couple years back, and have more classical production, engineering, and mastering projects slated for 2018 (by the way classical music projects are pretty demanding). Did a radio spot for a $4 billion dollar multinational corporation a couple months ago. I'm editing a loop library from funk legend Mike Clark (if you don't know who he is, look him up). I've been enlisted to help mix and master a project that Brian Hardgroove (ex-Public Enemy) is doing with Stewart Copeland (ex-Police), and finished mastering a song two months ago by Fred Schneider of the B-52's for an upcoming film.
 
If it would make you happy,  I can brag more in future posts about the stuff I'm doing. I just figure most of it is irrelevant for people who just want to know how to accomplish something with SONAR. 

And since you seem to think the projects I do are just "hobby" projects, no projects for clients are recorded to a USB flash drive. My backup media for clients are a pair of hard drives, and Blu-Ray data discs (two copies from different manufacturers, one set stored off-site with the client) using discs with non-LTH dyes. Surely you are aware that when stored under proper environmental storage conditions, non-LTH Blu-Rays are more reliable and have a longer life than SSD (which will die for the same reasons as flash drives, they're just more robust and will last longer), hard drives, flash drives, standard DVDs, etc.
 
However I also do a lot, and I mean a LOT, of testing and that involves doing projects with tons of read/write cycles. Why should I wear out an SSD when I can record to a flash drive and have a reasonable expectation that the project can survive for a few weeks or even several months?
 
The only problem that shows up "in a post like this" is your reading into it something that conforms to your prejudices instead of reading what I wrote. The only two use cases I mentioned were storing samples for Rapture Pro and "for regular songs, it works very well for playback." It think pretty much everyone knows that flash drives can read wicked fast. Storing samples on them for reading, or songs for playback, is fast, and you're not dealing with the issues caused by multiple and extensive re-writes. 
 
Then I asked the question about using them for projects. Why? Because QSC recently qualified a USB 3.0 drive for recording with their TouchMix 32 mixer. I wanted to know what kind of experience people had, if any, with using them for complete projects. Yes, I also do quick mobile recordings (e.g., field recordings for sample libraries) and I'd rather not take an SSD from the studio that has other data I can't afford to lose when I can just bring a USB flash drive for quick backup or even potentially (which is why I asked the question) real-time recording.
 
Open-minded people who don't have an axe to grind might be curious about how I do use USB 3.0 drives currently. Studio One has around 25 GB of content and I have about 60 GB of Rapture Pro Content and my own "go-to" loops. I want to use this content on a Windows desktop and a MacBook Pro with an SSD drive that doesn't have enough space for 85 GB of storage that just sits there most of the time. I put the content (which is backed up to four Blu-Ray discs) on a USB drive and keep it tethered to the desktop for reading content into SONAR, Ableton Live, and Studio One. But when I go on the road, I can pop the flash drive into my computer bag and use it with the Mac. If it gets run over by a truck, no big deal.
 
The reason I like to tether USB drives is the connectors themselves are typically rated at only 1500 insert/remove cycles. Because I use the drives primarily for transfers, it's more likely there will be a mechanical failure before a cumulative cell failure that makes the flash drive inoperable.
 
I have another USB drive tethered to my desktop. My projects are always stored on two hard drives. However, at the end of the night, I copy everything I did that day to the flash drive so I have yet another backup should anything happen with the hard drives. I usually flush the flash a few days later as it gets replaced with what's next.
 
Flash drives are also handy with Ableton Live for unique reasons which probably don't interest you. I've written about this in the past.
 

 there's always a few fanboys to defend his general lack of actual current studio credibility

 
That's probably because they actually know my credits. 
  
 
 
 

The concern I'd have with a flash drive is write endurance. Real SSDs have overprovisioning and smart controllers that deal with the fragility of flash memory and make them last a long time. Sticks usually don't, to keep cost down. They are a dirt simple controller and a flash chip. So what it means is they can just all of a sudden fail and lose some or all of your data. Of course something heavy hitting like recording thrashes the data around on there more, leading to an increased chance of an issue.
 
If I was going to do something like recording to a stick I'd probably get one of the ones that are designed for Windows to Go since they are usually not only faster but more resilient, often having SSD controllers on board. The Kingston DataTraveler Workspace and the Super Talent Express RC4 are two I have experience with at work that seem to do well.

chuckebaby
 
But sometimes it is better to just walk away and ignore it then escalate it.

 
I wouldnt worry too much about it Chuck. Most of us would prefer to chat with the positive and generous people who hang here, but we are all big boys and girls. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to call out someone who comes in swinging from the shadows and clearly has an agenda. Not a big deal. The world will continue to turn even without his precious bookmark:)