Flash Drive versus Hard Drive

Was just thinking this morning what if instead of saving individual projects on external Hard Drives if it benefit to do it on or from a flash drive and if performance would suffer or benefits from the differences in different hard drive speeds. Not sure how all this works within a computer but was just a thought.

Would be nice to just pop in a flash drive (which are inexpensive) for each individual group as you work with them and its all and the only thing on that drive. Nothing to fumble through or around or get yourself confused with.

I currently do it from an external Hard Drive but as I save things, sometimes files will get mixed up or stored in different places than in a folder for that band/group or individual.

Just me thinking outlowd

Feel free to share your thoughts/feelings on this idea-Im not that technical with computer lingo/operations but can manage fairly good.

 

Maybe if you had a USB3 flash drive. That may work fast enough?

Thanks Karyn-Thats exactly where Im WEAK-Not knowing the makeup and workings like that.

Good point Herb LOL I will maintain the backup on HDD  

Depending on your storage space and level or depth of commitment to the bands..... burning the bundles to DVD would also be an option. 

Understand that so far, while the current media does have a fairly long shelf life.... there are no guarantees that any of them will be in readable order in 5 years or more from now.  I'm thinking there is a pretty good chance that with several back up options, at least one of them should work fine.....and this also assumes that in 5 to 10 years you would actually wish to open those files again..... maybe if the band was big and famous, but......more likely for nostalgia.

I burned CD's of some of my pre-sonar projects. One project to a CD. When I tried to open them in MC 4......some opened, and some were giving me the "files corrupted or unreadable" message..... 

So, I simply moved on..... I knew I could record them again if I chose..... but ....nahhhhh.... 

USB3 flash drives do exist, but as Karyn noted it's not the communication method that's the bottleneck. It's the device itself.

A better solution would be to reserve a hard drive for current projects and then move them to other media when they're done, in order to free up space on your primary drives. This is how most commercial studios do it, except they may dedicate an entire drive to each project. The client pays for the disk drive. It gets labeled and goes into a dust-free cabinet for storage.

You can get a 1TB external USB hard drive for under $100 that will store literally thousands of projects. If your projects are precious to you - and whose aren't - it may be worth buying two drives and backing up to both of them. Flash drives would also be OK as secondary backups. Store your secondary backups somewhere other than in the studio (a glovebox in the car will do if you're using flash drives).

No medium is 100% reliable, not hard drives, not thumb drives, not CDs nor DVDs. Redundancy is your only protection.