Qu Drive USB port powered?

[FritzyParticipant]

Expecting my new Qu-16 this week, impressed by what I read, hear and see. Mostly for live shows to be downloaded to PC for mixing. I’m a little confused about the recommended drives. I found one online video where the reviewer was discouraged that the Qu-Drive USB port does not provide power and any drive must have it’s own power supply.

I do have a Seagate Backup Plus drive and it is USB powered, as are some of the A&H recommended drives. The WD Elements 500GB seems to be recommended by several users here as functional, and it is USB powered. Perhaps the video reviewer was mistaken? Thanks, Fritzy

[[XAP]BobParticipant]

The power isn’t officially rated, but low powered drives are ok. Unfortunately low power and high (enough) performance are often “pick one”, so the recommendation is external power.

Various people here use a sandisk extreme stick to good effect. Certainly seems fast enough to handle 18 track recording to me…

[robbocurryParticipant]

Sandisk Extreme uSB3 works perfectly for me too:)

[FritzyParticipant]

Thanks, a bit of a crash course on this, 3 weeks to know this board inside out. I was hoping to plug in some memory and get right down to lessons. Suppose I was overthinking the need for fancy drive hardware. The Sandisk Extreme route sounds like a good start. The vibration issue sold me on the Sandisk. And I’ll make sure of the firmware update. I’m sure I’ll be searching this forum as often as the manual in the coming days.

[timhumParticipant]

I use the WD Elements 500GB drive. It was used recently for a two hour gig with no breaks and there were no dropouts or any other problems. I bought a Sandisk extreme USB stick and will use that next time after testing it of course. Make sure you buy the USB stick from a reputable source, there are a lot of low spec pirated copies out there.

[eotsskleetParticipant]

I have a WD Elements 500GB drive as well – first recordings didn’t went well and i tried (with help of A&H) to sort out what’s the problem – i has dropouts on the recording! Finally i found out that the WD harddisk hasn’t got the newest firmware on it as well needed to be defragmented!
Whatever disk you try to use – make sure you’ve got the newest firmware on it and before you have an important recording make a test-recording for ab hour or so to check if there are some problems! (I tested mine with a sinus tone for 2hours to see if there are any cuts in it!)

[robbocurryParticipant]

……and if you’re using an HDD with a spinning drive, make sure it’s insulated from vibration if you can:)

[Lee7Participant]

500gb Smasung M3 Portable for me, recorded many hrs without any problems and is powered from the USB input.

[coffee_kingParticipant]

Sandisk Extreme uSB3 works perfectly for me too:)

Yep, what this guy said. Theyre awesome

[FritzyParticipant]

Excellent, many thanks. I think I’ll experiment with the Sandisk Extreme for this upcoming live gig. I’m consuming the manual every night, it’s starting to make sense. I’m coming from our dear (old) Mackie 32-8 analog board. I have a couple questions, I’ll be glad to create a new thread if it helps.

1) I believe a 64GB flash drive holds about 6 hours of multitrack?

2) Is it best to stop and restart recording at song or set breaks instead of one continuous run? I have 5 bands going for about 5-6 hours. I think I saw this stop-restart issue mentioned here.

3) I would like to record 18 channels and also be able to simultaneously use maybe 4-5 channels to feed a PA for announcements and perhaps keyboards. I’m not quite clear yet if the Qu-Drive is engaged how much flexibility I have with the mix outputs 1 to 10. The signal flow chart seems to indicate the mix outs as pre Qu-Drive, but I’m used to digital global settings throwing me a curve sometimes. In record obviously I have channel function, just want to be sure the mix outs aren’t disabled somehow.

Two more days and then it’s early Christmas for me. Again, my sincere thanks for all your assistance.

[[XAP]BobParticipant]

64 GB is around 6 hours – and a second one would obviously give another 6 hours (although there is a “start up time” associated with the switch)

Continuous run – this is one thing I’d like to see changed, the start up time for recording is too long to be able to chop and change during a set

QU Drive doesn’t affect the mixes at all, you can still use all of them.

[robbocurryParticipant]

I found my Extreme USB “Arms” much faster than my WD HDD. Fast enough that I was able to stop and start between songs with one band.
You’ll need to check it out for yourself but since I started using the USB stick, the HDD has stayed in it’s case;)

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