It works pretty well, and if you install the Rapture Pro content in a fast flash drive and point to it, the sounds launch wicked fast. I got a 128 GB drive for $30 - definitely worth it. Don't know if you can record a zillion 96 kHz tracks to it, but for regular songs, it works very well for playback. Does anyone think using a flash drive for doing projects  isn't a good idea?

Hey Craig.
I was using good quality usb 3 flash drives for my live shows, 24 - 40 tracks per project + fx, and they worked just fine. They did, however, fail on a fairly regular basis and return errors. Sonar would just stop randomly once they started to fail.
Reading up on it, allegedly (it is the internet) the controller chips are inferior to those in an ssd drive and are not designed for constant, heavy duty transfers.. I purchased a tiny Samsung SSD, and it has powered on for 18 months without a problem. The flash drives have been relegated to backup, as yet unused.
The write speed on the samsung is also many times faster than a flash drive, and it is still very small.
 
http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/portable/t3.html
 

Make sure you format it NTFS, if it isn't. Otherwise, you're apt to run into some nasty surprises with large files.

Flash drives have a nasty habit sometimes of becoming bricked with a controller failure where it's just not a drive anymore. Saw more than a few customers come in with just this condition.

Wow.
 
" Does anyone think using a flash drive for doing projects  isn't a good idea?"

This is indicative of someone who has never really been responsible for other peoples recordings..I would never in a million years think of using something as temperamental as a USB storage device to keep ANY project I was interested in maintaining, let alone a project for any client, and therein might be the major difference in how this product was used...recording studio or hobbyist. I barely ever used USB to BACKUP anything, usually just moving things from machine to machine until I got the network set up.

USB bus has a lower SUSTAINED throughput...it might be "as" fast but the data delivery guarantee compared to fire-wire is much lower.

And honestly for a few bucks more you can have a 128 gig SSD drive that is faster than USB and has a better lifespan.

Impermanence is a mindset practiced by users not builders.

For just reading (loops, samples, programs) modern USB drives can be ok. They have sequential speed comparable with HDD and can beat them in seeking. But as soon as the data are continuously overwritten, they still die relatively fast.

Psychobillybob
Wow.
 
" Does anyone think using a flash drive for doing projects  isn't a good idea?"

This is indicative of someone who has never really been responsible for other peoples recordings..I would never in a million years think of using something as temperamental as a USB storage device to keep ANY project I was interested in maintaining, let alone a project for any client, and therein might be the major difference in how this product was used...recording studio or hobbyist. I barely ever used USB to BACKUP anything, usually just moving things from machine to machine until I got the network set up.

USB bus has a lower SUSTAINED throughput...it might be "as" fast but the data delivery guarantee compared to fire-wire is much lower.

And honestly for a few bucks more you can have a 128 gig SSD drive that is faster than USB and has a better lifespan.

Impermanence is a mindset practiced by users not builders.

Hmmm. Aside from the massively judgemental personal assumptions (you seem to have a bit of an axe to grind there ole mate!), I might have agreed in 2007. When we were tethered to USB2, I used firewire or e-sata for anything I could as there was a massive performance advantage over usb2. That said, both were plagued with compatability issues. I remember spending days tracking down laptops with Texas Instruments controllers to ensure they would work with my devices. Since USB3, the performance difference is far less, and more importantly, USB 3 easily handles anything you throw at it for audio production, and there are almost no compatability issues with any type of device. 
You seem to also be conflating flash drives with all USB storage. My portable studio setup has been USB storage based for 10 years, and I have never lost mine or anyone elses recordings.
 

A USB3 flash drive is an inexpensive way to speed up loading of samples (dimension, rapture, and bigger instruments). I've had a flash drive for my Garritan CFX for nearly two years. Works like a charm.
 
For a while I ran my projects off another flash drive and copied to local drive frequently. Worked fine and fast. I eventually just switched back to the main drive, as I saw limited benefit.
 
 

tenfoot

Psychobillybob
Wow.
 
" Does anyone think using a flash drive for doing projects  isn't a good idea?"

This is indicative of someone who has never really been responsible for other peoples recordings..I would never in a million years think of using something as temperamental as a USB storage device to keep ANY project I was interested in maintaining, let alone a project for any client, and therein might be the major difference in how this product was used...recording studio or hobbyist. I barely ever used USB to BACKUP anything, usually just moving things from machine to machine until I got the network set up.

USB bus has a lower SUSTAINED throughput...it might be "as" fast but the data delivery guarantee compared to fire-wire is much lower.

And honestly for a few bucks more you can have a 128 gig SSD drive that is faster than USB and has a better lifespan.

Impermanence is a mindset practiced by users not builders.

Hmmm. Aside from the massively judgemental personal assumptions (you seem to have a bit of an axe to grind there ole mate!), I might have agreed in 2007. When we were tethered to USB2, I used firewire or e-sata for anything I could as there was a massive performance advantage over usb2. That said, both were plagued with compatability issues. I remember spending days tracking down laptops with Texas Instruments controllers to ensure they would work with my devices. Since USB3, the performance difference is far less, and more importantly, USB 3 easily handles anything you throw at it for audio production, and there are almost no compatability issues with any type of device. 
You seem to also be conflating flash drives with all USB storage. My portable studio setup has been USB storage based for 10 years, and I have never lost mine or anyone elses recordings.
 

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.

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 am after all on the Sonar forum soon to be the dustbin following the footsteps of Gigastudio...but perhaps my issue should have been with Gibson not giving a rats ass about product placement in the recording studio industry.

Man we are all hurting right now (Because of what happened to Cakewalk).
Just enjoy the last few weeks (or how ever long we have left here on Cakewalks death row) and try to take away something from this forum. Its been good to all of us over the years.
 
the last thing we need right now is to start arguing with each other over petty shet like thumb drives.
Im sure you know what I mean.