October 4th, 2010 – As I slowly install all the music software back onto my hard drive, it occured to me that some of you may not know that it’s a good idea to put all your samples and project files onto a second hard drive. Not only will you save space on your main drive, but offloading some of the reading and writing of audio onto another drive will prevent clicks and pops, or even writing errors when recording. Spreading the heavy lifting will help your system handle the load more effectively.
Of course, your second drive will need to be able to write and read at a quick rate so you’ll need to be running in a second hard drive slot in your PC, or at least a Firewire 400 connection. I personally don’t use USB 2.0 for audio, but I know that some do, so if you need to save some money and don’t have a Firewire connection, you can use that at the very least. Happy recording!
Actually USB 2.0 is faster then Firewire… 440 mb/s vs firewire 400 mb/s.
@Jonas: While USB 2.0 has a higher top speed, the total information over time is lower; this is why most professional audio interfaces are Firewire. For audio on separate drives, USB 2.0 transfers data in bursts which doesn’t work well when dealing with large files that need to be triggered live.