Tracking to an external drive?

[Joseph Hanna]

Originally Posted by Ty Ford

Joe, my friend,

Good to see you out here.

Can you please just say what you mean.

Best,

Ty

Still out there kicking'. Somedays harder than others

[Joseph Hanna]

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

Are you saying you put your audio and sessions on the SS boot drive? Or on a different internal drive?

Yes. We work to the internal SS boot drive. It's not a secondary internal drive.

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

Nobody's saying you have to work to an "external" drive, as in "outside the computer." They're saying you should work to a drive other than the boot drive, which presumably also has your DAW app on it. It's just that in the case of a laptop with a single internal drive and no space for another one if you don't ditch your optical drive, "not the boot drive" and "external" are, in effect, the same thing.

Yes what you just described was the status quo in the industry since I've been involved, which was sometime shortly after rocks showed up on Earth. I'm aware of the "why". As I mentioned earlier if it's storage space we're discussing (as it appears some are) that would be a completely different topic than drive performence. We clean our (internal) drives to a server after each and every shift unless we fear there'll be a need for the next engineer to have access. Since with most of our shows the product ships very shortly after it's mixed seldom do we anticipate the need to keep hold over sessions. "How much" is on our drives is extremely small and hasn't grown significantly in three years.

Also as I mentioned earlier the whole mantra of external drives started when it was absolutely a necessity. Operating systems were archaically and numbingly slow. Drives fragmented at rate which kept us defraging every other day. Memory allocation (as it applies to applications) wasn't automatic and although Pro Tools allowed for memory allocation, many applications did not. Processor speeds were a tenth of what they are now and the biggest issue of all was how drives "spun" audio out to the hard drives, that is in a fragmented manner. Drives were also dramatically smaller (as have been mentioned) so keeping boot drives lean and mean was virtually impossible without extraordinary attention and on a daily basis. All of this combined to make external drives a must despite (for those around back then) the enormously frustrating issues caused by scsi drives with scsi cards and scsi drivers which were at very, very best biblically finicky and often frustratingly unreliable. Simultaneous to all these issues along came both Sweetwater and Glyph industries which I'm positive helped to dramatically inflate the notion of external drives as we perceive them even today. Although I knew the guys from the early days of Glyph and genuinely found them delightful folks, I never believed in their products. More voodoo.

These, among a handful of others, are reasons the industry starting the chant of "external drives" and undeiably with good reason. External drives are still totally viable as we speak. Absolutely nothing wrong with using them and they can be, for some, a great advantage. Certainly portability being chief. I've got no beef with using external drives however I do take issue with them being mandatory especially in the light of the new SS drives.

My point all along is those embryonic reasons that launched the move away from using boot drives for audio are by and large completely gone.

[midwinter]

I just wanted to pop back in and give a hearty THANK YOU to everyone who has commented on this. All very helpful, and a completely fascinating discussion.

Thanks, again.

[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by Ty Ford

I'll do some tests with the new iMac Pro.

BTW, somewhere in my Mac-Museum, I have an 80MB Lacie Drive with SCSI ports that cost about $800. (on sale!!)

Regards,

Ty

Hi Ty

I have a whole BOX full of SCSI drives and Firewire drives that are less than 100MB.

Modern equipment is so much better!

The only time I don't record to external drives is when I'm recording with my Zoom H4N but as soon as I'm done recording, the SD card is backed up to 2 locations.

[MikeBmusic]

I remember my first PC (late 80s), which cost $1200(!) - when its original 20M HD died, I found the smallest replacement I could get was 40M - for close to $300. Just think: a couple of weeks ago I bought a thumbdrive with 64G capacity for $20.

[midwinter]

Originally Posted by MikeBmusic

I remember my first PC (late 80s), which cost $1200(!) - when its original 20M HD died, I found the smallest replacement I could get was 40M - for close to $300. Just think: a couple of weeks ago I bought a thumbdrive with 64G capacity for $20.

I bought 16MB of RAM once for around $400.

I just bought a 2TB drive for $52.

[Ty Ford]

We live in amazing times, but they probably said that when B&W TV happened, and again when color happened.

[FrankHudson]

Originally Posted by ljguitar

Hi Ty

I have a whole BOX full of SCSI drives and Firewire drives that are less than 100MB.

Modern equipment is so much better!

The only time I don't record to external drives is when I'm recording with my Zoom H4N but as soon as I'm done recording, the SD card is backed up to 2 locations.

This brings back memories of SCSI termination and ID issues, and early hard drive "stiction" issues. And external devices always used a different SCSI connector than you had cable on hand for. Oh, the horror...

[Brent Hahn]

Originally Posted by FrankHudson

And external devices always used a different SCSI connector than you had cable on hand for. Oh, the horror...

Just like the USB devices I have now.

[Ty Ford]

and suddenly, this forum turns into rec.audio.pro newsgroup!!

Yikes!

[midwinter]

Do we make an IRC channel next?

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by midwinter

Do we make an IRC channel next?

What's an IRC channel ?

[midwinter]

Internet Relay Chat. Part of the pre-web internet.

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by midwinter

Internet Relay Chat. Part of the pre-web internet.

I good I hoping it was not Internal Review Committee

[DupleMeter]

Originally Posted by KevWind

I do not think anyone said that the concept of recording to a secondary drive was outdated. What was said was the some of the initial conditions that made a secondary drive standard practice and considered necessary (i. e. slow processing speeds and limited space) no longer apply with today's computers

Not being a computer designer, software engineer or programmer, etc. I do not know the answer to one question about the above statement (not challenging just don't understand and am curious )


As you go about any task on a computer the boot drive is writing swap files (virtual memory), cache files & constantly writing system state changes to the drive. You get to a certain point (track count) where this will cause problems. Even an SSD can only do 1 thing at a time.


So I get the gist of the above but what I don't understand is . So assuming as you say the processor is doing these tasks one task at a time, Arn't all these tasks still going to be done "one at a time" in the computer processor, regardless of weather the file storage is on the primary drive or a second drive ? ? , If so then I am not clear on what functional difference in terms of speed or congestion would it make between the processor writing to and reading off of the primary drive, or a secondary drive ? Isn't the processor doing the same amount of work regardless of file storage location ? Or are you saying that having a second drive is in fact allowing the processor to now multi task ??? I do not know so I am asking ...

Aah, but processors CAN perform multiple tasks at once. The whole multi-core thing is exactly that. On my MacBook Pro I have 4 cores. So 4 simultaneous instructions. Now if 1 process is managing writing a swap file & another is writing your audio to disk, but they’re both going to the same physical drive you have s bottleneck. At some point that bottleneck will manifest itself as a problem with your audio file because the OS will prioritize it’s process (writing the swap file) over a 3rd party process (your DAW writing the audio file).

This is why you want to record to a drive that is not your boot drive. External or internal secondary drive...whatever works for you.

There are also other considerations. I am simplifying a bit. We can also get into the nitty gritty of disk controllers & data busses & how they communicate. But that may be more detail than we need to get into.

Does that help demystify this a bit?