my laptop doesn't support usb 2, is usb 1.1 fast enough?

thanks

Fast enough for what?

It's fast enough for data transfer from my external drive, and it's also good enough for my Behringer BCR 2000 Midi Control Console.

Hope That helps, but if you're thinking of somethign else, let us know what, and I'm sure someone will answer!

R.

Sorry about that, I was in a hurry and didn't complete my thought...

Fast enough for mixmeister to access/use/run/mix/operate (etc...) an external drive. Say I have 3 tracks mixing at the same time, can USB 1.1 handle this?

Thanks

Difficult to answer that one A.

It depends upon the tracks, whether you have fx applied, the load on your laptop at the time etc.

The easiest option is to download the demo from the MixMeister site and try it out, at least this way *you* know whether it's going to be up to the job for you or not.

I never had any issues with USB 1.1 when using the demo of Fusion, and certainly never have any problems with Studio 7's performance!

HTH

R.

quote:

Originally posted by amnesia623:
Sorry about that, I was in a hurry and didn't complete my thought...

Fast enough for mixmeister to access/use/run/mix/operate (etc...) an external drive. Say I have 3 tracks mixing at the same time, can USB 1.1 handle this?

Thanks

I'd say no, USB1.1 isn't fast enough. Its only 11-12Mb/s. Whereas USB2.0 (hi Speed USB) is 480Mb/s (or so it says on the spec sheet).

If you're laptop (or desktop) is without USB 2. Strongly consider a PCMCIA (or PCI) addin adaptor to give you USB 2.

Bottom line is that you want the maximum bandwidth that can be afforded by the HDD/USB interface.

It also worth noting from fairly inscientifc tests that Ive conducted that some USB2 implementations (at chipset level) are better than others. Do a google for usb 2.0 benchmarks (and the usb2 interface)

quote:

SiSoft Sandra 2001 Benchmark Results
HDD Benchmark
Score
1. USB 2.0 11462
2. USB 1.1 974
3. Hard Drive 26544

The above results are form a webpage which indicate that direct attached HDD (using ata) is 20x faster than USB2 and that is 10x faster than USB1 attached.


HTH
OB

USB 1.1 is sufficient to handle 8 audio channels simultaneously.

Serato's SL1 and M-Audio's Conectiv are BOTH USB 1.1 devices and support 4 stereo inputs and 4 stereo outputs simultaneously while using low latency ASIO drivers.

But without knowing more about what you're asking it's difficult to know exactly what you're asking.

USB 1.1 is a deprecated standard. It is MUCH slower than USB 2. In terms of accessing data from a USB external drive, bottlenecks could result if you attempt to access too much data simultaneously off the drive. In terms of Mixmeister, this could lead to sound dropout if your music file data cannot be accessed quickly enough, most notably in areas of a set where multi-track layering is accessing multiple sound files at once. It would be difficult to calculate when this might occur, because it would depend largely on how many files were being accessed, the size of the files (amount of data from each file needing to negotiate the USB interface), and other factors.

In terms of live performance, I would say absolutely not. If you are working in a studio situation and can live with the possibility of data bottlenecks, OK. But, with a laptop with only a 1.1 USB interface, your best bet would be to get yourself an internal laptop 2.5" drive of adequate size to handle your needs, and then transfer your data onto the internal drive from your USB storage drive as needed. Bear in mind also, that on older laptops, the speed of even the internal drives is slower than standard ATA drives in desktop machines of the same generation(4200 or 5400 rpm ATA100 vs. up to 7200 rpm ATA133). With SATA on new laptops the speed has risen to 7200rpm 1.5 GB (150) and on Desktops to 10000rpm 3.0GB (300) both with increased memory cache (up to 8MB on laptop drives and 16MB for desktop drives).

Furthermore, laptop PCs overall are ALWAYS slower than their contemporary desktop counterparts. With older systems running modern software applications (like Fusion), you need to try to maximize your hardware performance potential as much as possible. See this post for more information.