Qu-Drive Compatible USB Device Database

[EinsteinParticipant]

Hi folks,

Please read the article “About Pen Drive Issues” in my blog https://lixosd.wordpress.com/2020/07/23/about-pen-drive-issues/ where you will know about my experience with a curious 3.1 flash drive show in this message. Thanks for your support.

[masher_ukParticipant]

Thanks for all the input on this.

Update:
Ok, the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD (as recommended by Mike C) finally arrived – you’d think there was a pandemic on or something… 😉

Anyway, I’m delighted to report that it works fine, successfully recording an 8 hour multitrack without a single error. It’s small, rugged and doesn’t require its own power supply. I went for the 500GB version simply because it was only a few quid more than the 250GB. Hopefully it’ll also prove to be reliable as time goes by. The supplied usb lead works but is a bit crappy so I ordered up a nicer one.

This is the drive: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B078SWJ3CF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Cheers,

masher_uk

[volounteerParticipant]

@masher_uk

Thanks for that link!!

Here is the usa amazon link

and only $75 !!

Aaamazing the comments say it works with XP!
I have been looking for a 500G drive but all I had found were much larger.
I need the 500G as my photoshop7 will not work if the disk is larger.

[Mike CParticipant]

Anyway, I’m delighted to report that it works fine, successfully recording an 8 hour multitrack without a single error. It’s small, rugged and doesn’t require its own power supply. I went for the 500GB version simply because it was only a few quid more than the 250GB. Hopefully it’ll also prove to be reliable as time goes by. The supplied usb lead works but is a bit crappy so I ordered up a nicer one.

Good to hear, thanks for the update!

[masher_ukParticipant]

@ Mike C
You’re welcome, and thanks!

[Anonymous]

This might be of use to someone?
Ive never had any issues using the Q drive and recorded 3 day seminars

Had a loan of a Samsung T7. 1 Tetribyte.
Though I would give it a run.
I have a friend who is really into movement of data fast and is experimenting with Fuse-drives and he talks about throttling. All SSDs throttle to a degree.
The higher the capacity of the SSD the lower the throttling.
So I tried this Samsung T7 out and put a sine wave into all channels for the maximum amount of time.. I think about 7 hours?
The Qu32 screen said “no errors” at the end.
I imported all tracks into Reaper and scanned visually and couldn’t see any dropout?
Here are some pics and a link to the ‘RE-Formating”
https://youtu.be/IFFokQZ4YTw

[MarkPAmanParticipant]

Some thoughts on testing.

Listening to a test recording for spikes or dropouts is very boring – especially if you’ve done all your tracks for 8 hours!

1. It’s useful to record a silent track, as any noise that shouldn’t be there will show up in the DAW easily.

2. Record a sine wave twice, with the polarity reversed on one – mixing these together should get you silence (or very close). Then in the DAW, shift one of these in time accurately, by a whole number of cycles – I tend to add a whole second. Now when you mix them together, you should still have silence, but any dropout will show up on screen.

[masher_ukParticipant]

@xyz Thanks for this. As I said in my previous post my new SanDisk SSD ‘desktop’ drive works fine. The original discussion centred around USB ‘thumbnail drives’/’sticks’ which despite, being listed as ‘compatible’ in the A&H compatibility spreadsheet, are not at least not for multitrack recording.

[Anonymous]

It’s useful to record a silent track, as any noise that shouldn’t be there will show up in the DAW easily

Yes
Thanks Mark. I will try that 1stly 🙂
When I get a ROUND TUIT
And I will get back here.

[Lee7Participant]

I can also confirm that the Samsung T5 SSD works great without any dropouts. Been using mine on & off for over 12 months and most recently on Sunday night at one of the rare shows I have been able to do here in the UK during the Covid crisis.

My SSD is the 500gb version, I do have a few 1tb models that I them use with my Macbook Pro due to it only having a small 250gb hd, however, 500gb or even the 250gb version would be more than ample for a multi track recording.

They are super light and small.

🙂

[John JParticipant]

Just bought 2 PNY Elite-X Fit 64GB’s. They’re $10.99 each now in 2021. We’ll see what happens….

[DilettantParticipant]

Seems like most Thumb Drives won’t work reliable for multitracking.

But what is the general Problem here?

48/24 makes a raw data Rate per Channel of somewhat around 150 kBytes/sec. so 32 Tracks should need a raw Bandwidth of roughly 5 Megabytes per Second.

Even if the Overhead for Filesystem, Metadata, Organization and so on doubles that (which would be a terribly inefficient implementation), that can not be a Problem. Even the crappiest USB Sticks i ever found were able to write 10 MBytes per Second or more on large files.

What comes up on some linux systems is that many thumb drives take very long lags (up to 30 Seconds) between big Blocks of Data.
Don’t know what they are doing there but that can generate filesystem timeouts sometimes. Even with that the overall writing
Speed extends an long-run average of 10 MBytes/sec in nearly all cases though.

So what goes wrong here? Incompatibilities with specs? A bigger write Buffer that could take 1 or 2 minutes of recording data
to bridge over that lags? Is the USB Port Hardware of the SQ flawed somehow?

If we could know that we could look out for thumb drive specs not triggering that Problem (and A&H could improve SQ Drive with next hardware generation).

[volounteerParticipant]

@dilettant

there are many factors involved with the problem which wont be fixed in this generation of devices

have you tried an SD card in a USB conversion holder to insert into the AH mixer ?
or try a spinning disk or non spinning HD to see what works for you.

[Mike CParticipant]

Here is a proven USB drive for multitrack usb recording, not exactly thumb drive in physical size though.
San Disk 500GB usb drive

The Kingston Data Travels I use work great for stereo recording and playback as well
as show and scene file storage but are not quite fast to keep up with long multitrack
recordings.

[CanonPaulParticipant]

Does anyone know if it is possible to link a network USB drive to the Qu?

Am interested in any proven drives (recording from the Qu) which can be accessed from a network.

Thanks.

Paul

[Author]

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