Firewire vs 3.0 USB ?

D

DameSmiff

New member
Hello all, so this past summer I've been building a jazz band "Just Us Just Listen"Just Us Just Listen - The Promo 2013 - YouTube and I'm ready to start investing getting proper equipment to record live instruments instead of just digital. So I've did some research into what mics and interfaces I'll need but I'm using a Macbook Pro Retina Display until the money stacks itself enough for me to purchase a desktop Mac. So as you may or may not know the hard drive on the Macbook isn't enough to handle recording large amounts of data AND read at the same time, so I need a heavy duty external hard drive. All the research I've put into finding the right hard drive has only led me to forums and blogger sites debating the speeds of 3.0 vs Firewire for storage purposes, so I decided to come back home and ask you guys with experience in using preferebly both 3.0 USB and Firwire for studio recording if not one or the other.

Now to the meat and potatoes of this post:

"Will a 3.0 USB External work fine or will I have to get my hands on a firewire external hard drive for recording a large number of tracks?"

Any information will help, also if I failed to mention any key points that will help you answer me thoroughly please let me know. Time isn't an issue for me as I'm still in the broke musician phase right now but I do need this information so when I do get the funds I can smoothly make the transition into properly building my studio for live instrumentation. Thanks again for taking the time to read this and check me out on my soundcloud if you're interested, I'll check yours out too!
 
If you crack open an external hard drive you will soon discover that it contains a regular hard drive plugged into a USB or FireWire adapter board and this additional middleman bullshit taxes the CPU more than connecting that same regular hard drive directly to the motherboard, same kind of thing with audio interfaces where the middleman protocol introduces unnecessary latency and jitter......which is why a tower system is much preferred.

If I had to use an external hard drive with a laptop (like if there was no optical drive to replace with a second internal hard drive) I would probably just go with USB for the simple fact that it's not a good idea to daisy chain a FireWire hard drive with a FireWire audio interface, having said that you could probably find a FireWire hard drive that also has a USB connectivity, but USB hard drives are cheap enough and useful enough for storage that even if you found it to be inadequate for audio streaming it still wouldn't be a waste of money because you could use it to back up your projects or hook it up to your TV or some shit.
 
I doubt 13 tracks will give you any trouble with just about any current HDD, no matter what the connection method used.
 
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