Daisy-chain Glyph Portagig 800 thru Ultralite? Possible?

[J8stringer]

I have added an audio HD via USB to my laptop system. I use an Ultralite mk3 thru my one fw400 port. To make use of fw transfer, is it possible to daisy-chain the Portagig (fw800) to the MOTU (fw400) to the laptop This is the order I'm forced into because of the fw800 to 400 converter chord. Has anyone used a Glyph or any other HD in this way?

[Mark S]

I would not recommend any firewire storage device on an audio bus that uses firewire. I use firewire for th audio and USB for the storage device.

This is only asking for trouble as you go forward. (and require more resources)

[VigilantSound]

I have done this with my 828mk3 and a cheap maxtor FW drive and a nice Glyph drive, works fine for me, But the quality of your audio and having enough bandwidth to use input monitoring is probably much more important to you than where your audio is stored so you could always record to an internal drive and then just transfer it later.

[TheRealRoach]

Nothing wrong with USB for audio hard drives. There are very few instances where i've noticed a difference between FW400 and USB 2.0.

[J8stringer]

Thanks to all three posts for the insight. You see so much on the forums that f/w is the way to go for transfer
of audio. I'm 6-10 audio tracks, with the rest (8-12) MIDI. After critical listening to the same recording on my internal and USB external, I don't hear an obvious difference. Both drives are 7200 rpm. I don't see or feel a difference in the DAW. So maybe, for now, I'll leave it as a USB drive. I need to hear the audio at 100%, so I don't want to mess with its bandwidth.

[TheRealRoach]

6-10 tracks? No freakin problem at all for USB. To give you an idea, I've done mobile recording on my laptop to a USB 2.0 hard drive streaming 24+ tracks of 24bit/44.1k audio while recording and monitoring another 12 mono tracks (drums), all at a pretty low latency (5ms round trip).

USB 2.0 has a bigger theoretical transfer rate of 480Mbps, whereas FW400 is 400 Mbps.
If you do the math, then one mono 24bit/44100k audio file requires 1058400bits per second, or 132300bytes per second, or 132.3 kilobytes per second, or 0.1323 megabytes per second (or approx 7.9 megabytes per MINUTE). Bottom line: one track of mono 24 bit 44.1k audio requires 1.0584Mbps.

What does this all mean? Your 10 tracks of audio are using about 10.584Mbps our of your 480Mbps. Even when you count the actual real-world USB 2.0 speed of about 320Mbps, you are only using about 3% to 6%

[daniel.sneed]

Just for fun :
Two years ago, I've mixed 7 songs in DP, each 20 audio tracks, 16bits/44.1, from a USB1 drive : Yes usb1! Not a glitch !

[Mark S]

Same here with my usb external drive and I record in 96/24.

[J8stringer]

Thanks again to all who responded. I've been at this DAW thing about two years, but since I created my home set-up with a Thinkpad and Ultralite Mk3, the stability and sound quality have improved It's good to know I can add more audio tracks or bump up my sample rate, and still be good. Now, if I add a third HD for content storage, I could move some Library programs from my Desktop studio, to bring them home on laptop, and give me more time to actually learn them!!