USB 3 external drives

[Tobe]

For some years i've been happily editing with firewire external drives. Now that USB 3 drives are flooding the market and fewer firewire options are available, does anyone have comments on whether or not USB3 will be adequate for 1440x1080 edit sessions? any recommendations for external 2 TB drives? and, will Edius (Win 7) recognized 4TB USB drives, or only see 2TB of the drive? Or should I stick with a Fantom 2 TB 7200 RPM Professional quad input drive?

[Jerry]

Tobe, your system should see the 3 tb or 4 tb drives. I have an X58 system with a 3 tb external USB 3.0 installed. I use it for storage and not editing.
The bios should be new enough, being that it is a Z68, to recognize the drive.

Speed would be determined by how many items are shared on the USB 3.0 bus as well as what is shared by the computer resources. This includes installed cards, SATA ports, etc. Speed of the drive used and the drive space available will also be determining factors in the speed.

This should help for general info:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/23508...rd_drives.html

[David Clarke]

I have had some issues with some USB3 raid boxes and external drives and some USB3 chipsets. Our 2011 pin motherboard has an etron chipset which has been fairly rubbish and if I plug in a RAID box it will drop out all the time. I put a renasas chipset card in the machine which solved this and now we will sell an extra USB3 card with every 2011 pin system.

Intel chipsets are generally ok, but I have also had problems sometimes with some drives connecting the drive to a front mounted socket on a PC, which is then connected to the actual motherboard using a loop through cable (the cable goes from the front socket, out the back of the case and plugs into the motherboard). If plugged directly into the back, the drive works; if plugged into the front socket with the loop through it drops out a lot.

Once a drive works they are nice and fast and I edit HD footage on them (normally AVCHD, sometimes GV Hq or Avid DNxHD).

[Tobe]

thanks for all the info, experiences and thoughts.

[THoff]

Originally Posted by David Clarke

If plugged directly into the back, the drive works; if plugged into the front socket with the loop through it drops out a lot.

You might need a better, shielded cable. I suspect you are picking up noise from the CPU and GPU.

[Jeff Chandler]

I've been editing full HD from USB 2 drives without any issues for a long time now, so USB 3 should work really well.

[Adbear]

Originally Posted by THoff

You might need a better, shielded cable. I suspect you are picking up noise from the CPU and GPU.

I have some of the equipment he's referring to and the cables are built into the case, so no real way of changing them. I've had long discussions with David about this and helped with testing out some of the USB 3 devices. You can take the same case and put in a Z77 or Z87 motherboard and that works really well, but install the 2011 pin board and use the onboard USB 3 and it has issues. It's not just internally, if you use a longer external cable plugged in through the back (over 2M) then it also drops out on the 2011 USB 3 controller, take the same drive and cable plugged into a Z77 or Z87 and it works flawlessly. But if you put in a third party USB 3 card and use the same drive etc that works fine, and I even connected the case sockets to the third party card and they worked too.
One thing I would point out though is the board David is referring to uses a Fresco logic not an Etron controller, though with the amount of testing he did I'm not surprised he got confused over which one was on the board

[David Clarke]

Adbear is correct. I had an Etron controller on a Z87 board which also caused be problems, which I did confuse with the Fresco logic controller on the 2011 Pin. Renasas & and Intel are the two that work really well.

[THoff]

Yeah, I added a Renesas (NEC) USB 3.0 controller to my X58-based editing system, and it has been solid. I have a 15-foot USB 3.0 cable that I use with it that hasn't given me any problems.

[Andy]

I'm working on X79 (Intel® Socket 2011) based PC's ... I too have issues with USB3 front panel connections ... but have no issues when connecting the same drives at the rear.

We edit almost all our shows using SSDs direct attached via USB3. Plenty fast, super simple workflow, super simple project management ... just wish Edius would give me an option to write waveform cache files etc to a specific media directory, rather than writing to the SSDs (which are sometimes very full).