New laptop has a usb3.0 port. I'm wondering if anyone has experience using an external usb 3.0 drive as a recording drive. I would be using a drive enclosure with a purpose spec'ed drive for recording, 7200 RPM and a big cache, and a fast write speed - something like this: http://www.microcenter.com/product/431318/Se_1TB_7200_RPM_SATA_60Gb-s_35_NAS_Internal_Hard_drive_-_WD1002F9YZ

A couple of questions, does anyone have experience using a USB 3 external drive for primary recording/playback?
Do I need to go for a 6 Gb/s transfer rate if USB 3 isn't really up to snuff?

Scott,

I haven't used USB3 for stream recording, but I have used it for large amounts of data copy (100Gb). It's very fast, and certainly much faster that UBS2.

Early IDE had a transfer rate of up to 133Mb/s and that was successfully used for audio live recording.

USB3 can supposedly do up to 625Mb/s

I would think it would definitely be up to the job.

Best
Trevor

I agree with Trevor. The drive supplied by PG Music for the audiophile version is a USB 3 drive, and it screams. I'm really enjoying using it. Since USB 2 was a sufficient throughput speed for digital audio, it seems USB 3 would surely be fine.

rockstar_not: No problems what-so-ever with my USB 3/Toshiba primary external drive BIAB setup down here in the flatlands - I expect you'd be just fine up there where the air is thin!

Most things are loaded to RAM and run from there. For example, when I load a KONTAKT sound sample... it's actually a number of files of varying sizes. They all get loaded into the memory so that the computer doesn't have to search for them and grab them off the spinning HD. Even at 7200 RPM, for big sound samples, that would prove to be very inconvenient.

By using the memory, the actual write or read to the drive can happen when the computer needs to do so.... and considering that wave audio is a few megabytes per second of audio..... it should be able to stream audio in or out if it really needs to.

Thanks for all the replies. I suspect that this will work fine. There's really no harm in trying it out as the drive can function as backup anyways.

I am a bit concerned that my audio interface is on USB 2 - I'm hoping that they operate as totally different busses.

USB 3 is definitely on a different Bus. It has separate connections inside the plug, and doesn't use the USB2 pins.