Qu-Drive recording time.

[Anonymous]

A little curious. I just finished a little learning session doing some 18 track recording to the Qu-drive. The SanDisk Extreme 64GB stick performed flawlessly. But after an hour or so of recording I only have an hour left on the drive. Is that about right?

I didn’t do the math but in an earlier post someone mentioned I could get about 6 hours of multitrack. (did seem like a lot but I didn’t think to question it) Started with a clean formatted stick. Thanks

[John-B]

I did a gig sometime back on Qu-Drive, on an actual HDD, NOT a stick, so that may be a difference, but as I recall, my 18 track files used about 25-28 GB. This was a little over 2 hours recording time continuous. I guess the stick is somehow handled differently? The files are 24 bit 48k sample rate wav, btw. Hope this helps.

[Andreas]

A little math should help: At 48kHz at 24 Bits each track consumes 3*48000 = 144.000 Bytes per second ~ 8MBytes per minute ~ 500 MBytes per hour. So 18 Tracks use about 9 GBytes per hour, that’s why a 64GByte are expected to store about 6 hours.

From a system view sticks and HDDs (or SSDs) are same, just differ in speed and access times.

Probably helpful to check the contents of the stick on PC/Mac to see where the space had gone to.

[coffee_king]

If your using with a Mac once youve used the files and trashed them off the memory stick remember to empty the Trash folder. Otherwise they still count as used space on the memory stick even though you cant see the files on it anymore.

[Anonymous]

Trash/recycle bin/recovered files would be my first thought.

[mamerica]

Did I miss something? I know you can record multi-track to a stick but I thought Allen & Heath did not recommend it. Has that changed? It’s cool if it works. I’m just curious.

[Anonymous]

Yes, that changed. Take a look at the “understanding Qu-drive” pdf.

[Andreas]

It only depends on write performance, and the SanDisk Extreme series is reported to work well.

Anyway, the NAND flashes used in all sticks (and SSDs as well) do require proper error management. While this generally works ok, it _may_ take too long in rare conditions which _may_ cause a dropout. I like that idea as well, but for critical recordings I probably stay with deterministic HDD.

[moon]

Sony 64GB thumbdrive works great too. 18 tracks 48 khz/24 bit files for 3 hours no problem.

[Author]

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