Recording to a USB thumb drive

You would be better off using an external hard drive due to the data transfer rate. I have backed up projects to thumb drives for transfer to another computer. But I never recorded directly to a thumb drive.

I am not saying it won't work. The audio your streaming may not need a high data transfer rate. It has been my experience that thumb drives are slower than hard drives. Maybe a hard drive would be a better way to go. Maybe you might not notice a difference with 8 or 10 tracks. but I think a large project may have problems.

I never tried it so I don't know for sure. If you try recording a large project let me know how well the system holds up. I have no difficulties using an external Hard Drive. 

My VS-100 transfers recordings and streams to an SD card. I have no problems there. Video is also transferred to SD cards on my video camera. I guess in the long run there is more then one way to skin a cat. let me know how well this works.

shoot I might just run a test or two myself when I get some time.

consider the fact that a thumb drive is easy to lose, while an external drive is not so easy to lose

one day i put my stuff on a thumb drive, just for a day, and then i stuck it in my shirt pocket, just for a few minutes

i realized what a really really stupid idea that was while in the john, and i'm still kicking myself for this one

let me just say that to this day i still have the image of my stuff going 'round and 'round while being flushed away, and my forearms getting soaked trying to save the damned thing

well luckily for me it was a #1 moment so no real mess, some #2's would have mucked up the recovery effort for sure

all 4 naught though, yup... it was gone

Tweakberry


consider the fact that a thumb drive is easy to lose, while an external drive is not so easy to lose

one day i put my stuff on a thumb drive, just for a day, and then i stuck it in my shirt pocket, just for a few minutes

i realized what a really really stupid idea that was while in the john, and i'm still kicking myself for this one

let me just say that to this day i still have the image of my stuff going 'round and 'round while being flushed away, and my forearms getting soaked trying to save the damned thing

 
 
LOL..Could still turn up down stream with embedded input....Just going with the flow...LOL...Hope be with you!

redbarchetta


It works.  I did set the directory in preferences. I'm doing it now. I just don't know if there will be issues down the road.  I just created a 1 track session so far with no issues. However, like some of you said, there could be latency issues. 

I read somewhere that to boost performance it's a good ideal to not save on the same drive that Sonar is installed.  I was thinking that having my projects saved / written to a thumb drive might be a good alternative.

Yes that is true "to boost performance it's a good ideal to not save on the same drive that Sonar is installed." The reason for this is because the processor is not accessing the same drive for system files, program files, and audio files. If you have a separate drive to stream the audio the main drive is freed up just to send system files and program files.

That being said I believe the advice was to use an external hard drive or even a second internal hard drive. You may not get that added speed advantage using a Thumb drive even though it works to stream audio to it.

You may run into issues if you are streaming 20 tracks through Sonar while overdubbing another track. You are not just streaming to the thumb drive. you are streaming from it too. That is were it may bog down.

The thing to do is to load a project file for mastering. anything from 17 to 30 tracks. See if you have any latency issues. get a project file here.

http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm 

download one of the practice project files for mastering. put it on your thumb drive and see if you have major latency issues. This is the test I want to run the next time I am in the studio. Try it on both a thumb drive and an SD card to see what works best. Ultimately the Hard drive is the best choice. I am just curious how well something like this will work in a pinch.

redbarchetta

Marcus Curtis

That being said I believe the advice was to use an external hard drive or even a second internal hard drive. You may not get that added speed advantage using a Thumb drive even though it works to stream audio to it. 

The thing to do is to load a project file for mastering. anything from 17 to 30 tracks. See if you have any latency issues. get a project file here.

http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm 

download one of the practice project files for mastering. put it on your thumb drive and see if you have major latency issues. This is the test I want to run the next time I am in the studio. Try it on both a thumb drive and an SD card to see what works best. Ultimately the Hard drive is the best choice. I am just curious how well something like this will work in a pinch.

Right, I understand what the advice was, I should have been more clear. I was letting the other person know that you CAN do it because he had said that he didn't know if it could be done. Understood, it's probably not optimal.  I'll look into an external hard drive. 


Thanks or the links to the project files.

Sorry if I misunderstanding your intent. I am gonna try loading one of those project on an SD card and a thumb drive just to see what the difference is. I wonder if there is any difference in speed between the two of them. I do like your outside of the box kind of thinking.

it totally works and can work well if you do a couple simple things
1. MAKE A BACK UP for when you lose the thumbdrive or drop it in the toilet.
 
the next points are all related the basics of SSD performance
2. don't keep more than a song or two on there at a time
2. thumbdrives aren't compatible with TRIM so the performance will severely degrade and more data gets written and deleted and copies and deleted etc etc.
2. I imagine that a lot of people with performance issues in their thumbdrive have used drives that had been previously used for shuttling files back and forth and with all the constant writing and re-writing, the drive is full of garbage. when you delete a file on SSD it doesn't delete it, it just marks the space that the file occupies available for rewriting. so when you start recording music, the drive wants to place your primal yawlp where your bootlegged movie used to be and it has to stop, erase that space, and then write your yalwp. so that is where the performance issue comes in.  SSDs use trim so the PC is constantly scrubbing those spots clean for optimum performance.
 
so go ahead and do it. I use using a 32gb drive for a little while but at the end of a session, i'd copy the file to my network drive. I didn't skimp on the thumbdrive either. get one that is regarded for it's sequential write/read speeds; that's more important that random write/read speeds, IIRC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

redbarchetta


Hey gunboatdiplomacy.
You mention that thumb drives are not compatible with TRIM, what exactly is TRIM?  I've never heard of it. I'm assuming this is something outside of Sonar.

For grins, I opened up windows defragger. It was 3% fragmented. Running defrag on it now. Never attempted to do this to a thumb drive before.

defragging is not the same as TRIM, as you discovered via wikipedia; it could make the performance worse (though not by much if it's a new/clean drive). there is a method to force-write the thumbdrive blank.  so it makes the space free and then actively turns that 'free space' to empty disk. i can't recall what the term is, but Toms Hardware forums will have info on that kind of process.
 
so good luck. i'm sure the thumbdrive will work.  i was running large projects in Reason 6 and some DP7 on it, but in the end i took my CDROM out of my MBPro and put a second SSD in the laptop and that is FAR SUPERIOR. and then when i went to windows and got a Vaio, i did the same thing. considering how cheap a 64gb SSD is, you might consider that if you have a laptop that you can remove the CDROM from.