Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

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sayatnova
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Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by sayatnova »

Hello Everyone,

I just got a new MacPro and will be getting an external mutli-bay HD enclosure in a few weeks. For now, I have several ext drives that I need to connect to it now to get back to work! Here are my questions:

All drives are 7200 spinners. I currently have no USB3, Firewire, or eSATA hubs. However, I am very open to get one if it seems the best solution.

I have a few old firewire 400 drives that are connected to the Mac with a firewire/thunderbolt adaptor cable, and then daisy chained to themselves via the ports on the drives themselves. I understand that this effectively turns this into a firewire 400 speed signal chain. That is OK, this is just for some old back-ups, and a scanner that I need access to.

I also have a few drives that have USB3, firewire 800, and eSATA that I want to actually record and work on. Of these three connections, I believe eSATA is the fastest? But, is it reliable for AV work? These do not daisy chain, so I am looking at a hub here. How are eSATA hubs to work with, any issues? Is this connection type going to be around for a bit? I don't see many drives with this around. Although they seem to be getting more affordable now that TB is more prevalent.

The same question applies to USB3: it is also faster than firewire 800, but is it reliable compared to firewire 800? If this seems a good idea (and seems many drives have USB3 connections now, so looking at future drive purchases, as well...), I will need to get a USB3 hub, and I have read a lot about interference issues and drives un-mounting spontaneously, etc, with USB3 hubs... There is talk about a recent chipset and firmware that solves this, but, it makes me really nervous. Are my fears unfounded?...

I can also just use a TB/Firewire800 cable and daisy chain the firewire 800 drives from the drives themselves, so no hub is needed. But, this seems a little dumb seeing as my new machine can do much more now...

I guess my feeling is that if eSATA and the USB3 connections are better than firewire 800, than which hub option in either format is the way to go for AV work?

Any one have thought or experiences about this?

Thank you, I appreciate any help.

~Shea
http://www.bfdmusic.com
Mac Studio Ultra, 64 gigs RAM, OSX 12.7.3, DP 11.3, UAD2 thunderbolt satellite octo, Apogee Symphony IO MK2 TB
4stripes
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by 4stripes »

They're all about the same. The bus speeds of these interfaces are faster than the drives can work anyway. I don't see any reason to believe the entire USB3 format is unreliable. It's built on an established interface by people way smarter than us.
sayatnova
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by sayatnova »

4stripes wrote:They're all about the same. The bus speeds of these interfaces are faster than the drives can work anyway. I don't see any reason to believe the entire USB3 format is unreliable. It's built on an established interface by people way smarter than us.
I can appreciate that, however, in researching these various connection protocols/hardware, there are quite a few threads on various AV forums that reference issues with USB3 hubs, in particular with regards to wireless interference (WIFI router, phones...) causing drives to loose connection randomly. Advice was wrap the cables and interface in copper/aluminium foil (not joking here...), and move the hub away from the wireless router. There was also talk of metal housings as being better.

Just wondering if anyone else had experiences with any of this? I would like USB3 to work for actual record/edit drives, so reliability is crucial.

Thank you,

~Shea
http://www.bfdmusic.com
Mac Studio Ultra, 64 gigs RAM, OSX 12.7.3, DP 11.3, UAD2 thunderbolt satellite octo, Apogee Symphony IO MK2 TB
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mikehalloran
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by mikehalloran »

I believe eSATA is the fastest?
eSATA works the same as a SATA internal buss on the old Mac Pro. Yes there are TB-eSATA hubs but they support 1 drive or 2 configured RAID. At $200 each, I don't see the point.

If there's TB-eSATA solution that supports Port Multiplier, that would be different. The only way I see it now is TB-PCIe and then get a PCIe card to support PM, attach it to an Addionics PM box ($100). You can hang up to 20 eSATA drives off a single card that way.

With SATA 3, USB 3 and Thunderbolt, the 7200 rpm of your drive is the limiting factor. Otherwise, USB 3 is a little faster than SATA 3 and neither are as fast as TB.

USB 3 is considered dicey for AV work. I do not know anymore than that. I'm not certain that Intel has USB 3 together the way that they advertise.
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sayatnova
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by sayatnova »

mikehalloran wrote:
I believe eSATA is the fastest?
eSATA works the same as a SATA internal buss on the old Mac Pro. Yes there are TB-eSATA hubs but they support 1 drive or 2 configured RAID. At $200 each, I don't see the point.

If there's TB-eSATA solution that supports Port Multiplier, that would be different. The only way I see it now is TB-PCIe and then get a PCIe card to support PM, attach it to an Addionics PM box ($100). You can hang up to 20 eSATA drives off a single card that way.

With SATA 3, USB 3 and Thunderbolt, the 7200 rpm of your drive is the limiting factor. Otherwise, USB 3 is a little faster than SATA 3 and neither are as fast as TB.

USB 3 is considered dicey for AV work. I do not know anymore than that. I'm not certain that Intel has USB 3 together the way that they advertise.

Thanks, Mike. Yep, your last sentence seems to confirm what I have been seeing around various forums. For back-up, USB3 is probably fine. For a target drive, not so sure... I will stick with firewire 800 for my single 7200 spinners for now until my external HD Bay gets here.

Thanks, this helps (again...;-)

~Shea
http://www.bfdmusic.com
Mac Studio Ultra, 64 gigs RAM, OSX 12.7.3, DP 11.3, UAD2 thunderbolt satellite octo, Apogee Symphony IO MK2 TB
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Shooshie
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by Shooshie »

mikehalloran wrote:USB 3 is considered dicey for AV work. I do not know anymore than that. I'm not certain that Intel has USB 3 together the way that they advertise.
With USB and USB2 the part they didn't tell you was that the USB design was half-duplex in transmission, meaning one-direction at a time. Firewire is full-duplex, talking both ways at the same time. Maybe at the unfathomable speeds these things operate, half-duplex vs. full-duplex is really just a philosophical preference, but it seems reasonable to me that in AV work you'd be better off with something that doesn't have to interrupt the stream every time it has to tell the remote drive that it's about to need these 200 samples anytime in the next 80 nanoseconds. But that's just me being philosophical.

Now, whether this applies to USB3 is something someone else will have to tell me. I haven't looked it up, and am not particularly interested in doing so. (yeah, yeah... I got things on my mind)

Shooshie
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4stripes
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by 4stripes »

sayatnova wrote:I can appreciate that, however, in researching these various connection protocols/hardware, there are quite a few threads on various AV forums that reference issues with USB3 hubs, in particular with regards to wireless interference (WIFI router, phones...) causing drives to loose connection randomly. Advice was wrap the cables and interface in copper/aluminium foil (not joking here...), and move the hub away from the wireless router. There was also talk of metal housings as being better.
You're talking about a different issue when you bring up hubs. How many Firewire 800 hubs do you see people using out there? That aluminum foil thing is ridiculous. Hubs are generally always a bottleneck, because people put all kinds of other crap on them, and most of them are pieces of crap.

Also, no DAW should be using wi-fi when doing audio. It's widely accepted that wi-fi interrupts things. If you read through manufacturers optimizations (Avid) they explicitly state this.

If one has a crap hub and runs wi-fi and other processes, it's not really USB's fault.
sayatnova
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by sayatnova »

4stripes wrote:
sayatnova wrote:I can appreciate that, however, in researching these various connection protocols/hardware, there are quite a few threads on various AV forums that reference issues with USB3 hubs, in particular with regards to wireless interference (WIFI router, phones...) causing drives to loose connection randomly. Advice was wrap the cables and interface in copper/aluminium foil (not joking here...), and move the hub away from the wireless router. There was also talk of metal housings as being better.
You're talking about a different issue when you bring up hubs. How many Firewire 800 hubs do you see people using out there? That aluminum foil thing is ridiculous. Hubs are generally always a bottleneck, because people put all kinds of other crap on them, and most of them are pieces of crap.

Also, no DAW should be using wi-fi when doing audio. It's widely accepted that wi-fi interrupts things. If you read through manufacturers optimizations (Avid) they explicitly state this.

If one has a crap hub and runs wi-fi and other processes, it's not really USB's fault.

Those are indeed good points, and I absolutely concur.

I think you don't see many firewire 800 hubs out there because most of these devices have 2-ports for daisy chaining on them already (in fact, all of mine do: scanner, disk burner, and HDs). I don't see that with USB3 and eSATA drives and devices - one port for each of these connection types. For these you need a hub if you run out of direct connections on your machine. This is why I started looking into it.

~Shea
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by Shooshie »

I don't know if this is still an issue or not, but it used to be that you could get passive hubs and powered hubs. I only got powered hubs for USB and USB2. Apparently, people with passive hubs had problems, as the advice I've always seen given is to use powered hubs.

Frankly, I've never seen a passive USB hub that I know of. Maybe an Apple keyboard is an unpowered USB hub, so that may be what they're talking about.
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by mikehalloran »

Shooshie wrote:Frankly, I've never seen a passive USB hub that I know of. Maybe an Apple keyboard is an unpowered USB hub, so that may be what they're talking about.
An Apple keyboard is an excellent example. Ih the USB 1 days, there were plenty of non-powered hubs on the market.

Most powered USB hubs become passive if the power is disconnected but a few don't work at all.

On MacBooks with multiple USB ports, only one supplies buss power (true for at least 10 years now). A powered hub is often required to connect a single device to these non-powered ports.
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by Armageddon »

SSDs have really come down in price -- I'm about to snag a 1TB internal SSD for my old MacBook for about $500 from http://www.crucial.com. My only concerns are, I've read a lot about overheating issues (not a problem if you're simply using it in an external enclosure) and the overall life of the SSD, which may indeed be a factor, unless you're backing it up regularly. That might be a way to go, though, if you want something fast enough to take advantage of your bus speeds.
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Re: Best ext HD connection format for AV work?...

Post by mikehalloran »

Armageddon wrote:SSDs have really come down in price -- I'm about to snag a 1TB internal SSD for my old MacBook for about $500 from http://www.crucial.com. My only concerns are, I've read a lot about overheating issues (not a problem if you're simply using it in an external enclosure) and the overall life of the SSD, which may indeed be a factor, unless you're backing it up regularly. That might be a way to go, though, if you want something fast enough to take advantage of your bus speeds.
The ones rated the highest have 10 year warranties and internal heat management. They reduce speed a little if internal temps start climbing. The 1T versions haven't broken the $500 point yet but, if those are your concerns, that's where you should be looking.

I just bought an 845 EVO, an enterprise class drive that has those features but only a 5 year warranty for less than $400. I'm not worried.

There are a few other threads on SSDs with lots more information.
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