flash drive question

[jisg]

It's been so long since I can remember this being addressed...it's like a newb question.

Is it advisable to load songs from a flash drive. I tried and it loaded from my flash drive where I'm backing up RW songs. It did load but... Can I or SHOULD I do this or just load and work from my C drive?

I just can't remember that far back...I thought it was discussed on the older forum. I did a search for "Flash Drive" here but don't see any answers. Nothing in the manual.
Just trying to keep my hard drive free of the numerous song attempts and their memory

Can you do your work on a flash drive? Save, close, re-open, work on song, save, close and store there instead of main disk?

thanks in advance

[mickeymix]

I do it all the time between laptop and PC's plus between PC's and Mac's as well with no problems.........works like a charm.
I also have my tunes saved to a 2nd drive (D in my case) plus an external so as not to lose anything.

[JouniL]

Actually the new gadget in town are Solid State Discs (SSD), that is large harddrives built upon flash drive technology. They are lightning fast and absolutely noiseless (good thing in a studio) but still costs a fortune.

[jisg]

Mickey -are you telling me you are opening from the flash and working on the tunes there? Not just storing but actually adding more to the song. I thought in the past that was a no no. Maybe I'm thinking of the first version before Standard.

JouniL -
Nice idea, but I'm working off a 4GB flash drive I bought at Circuit City for $17.99.

[jisg]

Can I ask one more time for the answer to this question;

Can I work on a flash drive? I mean -- record to a Flash drive. Start from scratch and save new song there, close, re-open, work on song add layers and editing, save, close -- work and store there instead of main C disk?

Or should I only use the flash for backing up.

sorry -
I was unclear as to Mickey's answer to me -- and now that I re-read my original post my question doesn't seem too clear,
I just wasn't sure what to do...I got a huge freeze up of Windows by trying to open a song from the flash the first time I tried it and then from there it opened just fine after a forced re-start ...so haven't tried anything with the flash untill I hear the correct way to do this.

Thanks again.

[davenz]

jisg

There should be no problem in being able to do this....HOWEVER....I would not use it as your main storage device for all your hard work without it being backed up elsewhere.

I use compact flash for my synth and it is definitely backed up on the hard drive. Just one little wrong move and it's gone forever.....no hope to recover.

I agree here, there is no problem at all using external or flash media for this BUT, writing and reading with most flash media is very slow compared to nice, fast onboard RAM and hard drive, so you *may* encounter issues there. Even though you may have fireire or USB 2 interfaces, writing (recording) especially is very slow.

As far as recovering data from flash drives, I have had very good success with this, using the right software, as long as the flash drive is not physically damaged; the problem is they are very susceptible to damage and file system corruption due to the constant plugging/unplugging, even when using the 'safe to unplug this device' method.

My main question is 'why' would you want to do this? You can always do everything on the computer, then simply copy the file to the pendrive to load onto another machine if you want to edit it somewhere else

Just my 2 cents

Dave.

[atalwar]

By Default Flash Drives are considered as removable storage Media , means optimized for quick removal. HDD's are optimized for write caching and other things.

Doing this for a song or 2 on flash drive might not be a problem as compared to doing all the work on em. Performance will suffer.

Also USB buses have limited bandwidth (across ports) and power requirements, many a times something or other or some other hardware will cause load on USB and may cause some malfunction or make the device unusable for a 5-10 seconds, which is more than enough for data loss. ( i am talking from first hand experience here).

Copying files does not take much time these days, and you will be always safe with your data when copying from HDD.

[jisg]

My main question is 'why' would you want to do this?

good question

I have found that when I empty my songs folder (when backing up) and have just one song that I am currently working with in my RW Songs folder the song opens way faster than if I have a folder with a few songs.

I have tried opening a song from a CD that was burnt as a back up and occasionally had freeze ups of RiffWorks while working that way. So that led me to question if this was not a good thing to do ( speaking from a computer science standpoint -- that I admittedly have no knowledge of )
So rather than waste my time and losing a song doing this I felt I would ask first...

2 weeks ago I lost my power supply and my motherboard went with it, the repair was so nominal (because the place that made my desk top for me 1 1/2 years ago to the specs recommended on the beta tester forum here are Intel distributors and the replacement ran me $50 for the mo bo + $20 for the power supply and $40 for labor - I threw in another $30 for a stick of RAM (3 GB now). I didn't loose my hard drive but I only had CD back ups of songs and experiments. Started thinking long and hard about backing up. I got a deal on a couple of 4GB flash drives and just thought of doing this as an option to the apparently memory laden Songs folder...I know I should have bought a real external hard drive but this happened 2 days after buying a GT-10 and spare cash was about gone and I wanted to keep the GT because ever since Oct. 07 when I bought my problematic Pod X3L I wanted the Boss unit too.
...I'll shut up now and thank you guys for the answers.