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.

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.

I washed one that was in a shirt pocket.

It's still working!

PNY 4 Gigger

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.

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.

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

scook


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

That's interesting, i've never heard of that before. Good read!

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.