This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] AMA editing

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] AMA editing - iffy USB3 playback?

I won't argue with Pat or Wilson.

It could be that in our case we just had cheap USB client provided drives... and superstition keeps me from buying them! :)

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On Mar 27, 2014, at 10:24 AM, Wilson Chao <wilsonchao@gmail.com> wrote:

Pat is spot on. One small comment I'll add, is that when testing a drive, you don't only want to check its data rate, but its seek time. Today's cheap drives tend to spin slower than pricey drives, but their data rates are often reasonably high because they have few platters of high density. Such a drive might play a single clip just fine, but choke on a sequence with fast cuts & lots of tracks. But yeah, my Avids run every day with a mix of drives including USB 3.0, with no problems.

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 4:49 AM, Pat Horridge <pat@horridge.org.uk> wrote:

It really comes down to the sustained datarate of the actual drive itself.
Many USB3 drives actually have lower sustained datarate HHDs inside.
The USB interface is capable of very high datarates but you need the drive inside the enclosure to be able to keep up.
Pick the right USB drive with the right internal HHD and you can get great results.
Granted USB does impose some CPU overhead on the computer but with the multiple fast cores of modern machines this is almost insignificant.

At VET we edit of a range of USB3 devices (even USB memory sticks!) but we too experience issues with cheaper slower drives.
Either run a transfer speed test of look up the spec on the actual HDD to see what it can do.