Karaoke Forums

First, there is not problem booting with multiple USB hubs to a windows system. I have no idea where that came from.

Secondly, how much data are you carrying? Is it more than 128GB? If it's not, then I would suggest you check out USB Flash drive. I bought my 128GB for $!00 and it's far more reliable than external hard drives since it has no moving parts. I can drop it from 10 feet without having data lost. And they are small enough and they draw power from the USB port, without having to use another port.

If you need more than 128 GB, then wait about 3 months and I am pretty sure 256GB version will be affordable to buy.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

You do have to check your specs, though. Remember that flash is still considerably slower than current-generation hard drives, and that it is limited in write/erase cycles. (In most cases, the ten- or hundred-thousand write cycle limit won't matter.)

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Actually, the FLASH drives are much faster than disk drives, specially in reads. If you look at the specs, disk drives have rotational latency in milliseconds, where is FLASH data can be accessed in microseconds. The write speed can be similar, depends on the drive but if you have your music transferred to the external drive, you will be reading 100% of the time from then on. As for the write cycles, the modern FLASH chips will last, let's say writing it 4 hours per day constantly, over 10 years. If you are reading them after you write it once, the cycle doesn't matter. The cycle only matters to writes.

I made mistake in the previous post. The FLASH drive I got was 64GB, not 128GB. You can get it for about $100. I have a lot of music, between the Karaoke CD+G and my DJ music, I don't even have it half filled. I have seen 128GB drives around, just expensive at this time. I think this is the way to go. Get a large FLASH drive, fill it up once and read from it many times without any worries.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

I use externals connected via HUBs all the time.

I just don't have cross traffic on them. I use them exactly for the paths that USB is specified with. Either one outgoing, or one incoming, both incoming, both outgoing, but never the different traffic connected on the same port.

They are faster in access, not in transfer. In other words, for small files they will be much faster. For multi-megabyte files, disk drives are still faster.


Of course. But the transfer rates are not as fast.


Depends on the drive. The best and latest have a million-write-cycle life, but not all have that.

As I said, you have to check the specs. You want 100,000 write-cycle plus, and a transfer rate in excess of 25Mbytes/second.

There are tradeoffs everywhere. Hard drives are reliable at a lower cost. Flash drives cost 2-4x more per gigabyte. They are also easy to nip as you walk by -- with a large one I would actually keep it anchored to something at a gig.

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A buddy of mine just got a new laptop with 256gb Solid State drive...essentially a large internal flash drive. Fast as hell with no noise or heat.

This is the way of the future. In 10 years or less we will look back and laugh about the "old days" when we stored data on primitive spinning platters!

The new bios doesnt have any problems. I had one computer that wouldnt bootup with a flash drive in it. My preference I would rather bootup with registered hardware, then mount external HDD then usb hub.

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Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

Again, I think you missed two main points of my discussion. It doesn't matter where the bottleneck is, the fastest a drives can transfer is limited to the slowest speed of the entire transfer speed. I used to work for disk drive companies, like Quantum and Conner and I can tell you there is significant bottle neck on the back side of the drive. It doesn't matter if the front end like SATA can transfer at 3Gbits/sec, if the heads off the media only picks up at 200Mbits/sec, then the entire drive can transfer sustained at 200Mbits/sec. That translates to about 24 Megabytes/sec.

If you look at USB, the interface will do 480Mbits/sec, which is about 60 Mbytes/sec. Since the read access is less than a millisecond, it doesn't contribute to the overall speed.

You talked about write, again, you write the music once to the drive then it's ALL read from that point on. There is no comparison on speed of USB FLASH drive versus disk drive.

Finally, the speed doesn't matter on files you are using on the karaoke music. They are pretty small, few hundred KB each at most. At that speed, sustaining even CD audio of 44KHz stereo, they speed doesn't really matter. What matters is other advantages, like reliability, size or portability and energy consumption, etc.



All the larger capacity FLASH drives use the new 45nm or smaller geometry with much better spread algorithm so they rate at over a million cycles life. You may had problem when these drives were 64MB but these drives are 128GB. No comparison. Again, write cycle is a moot point since you write once and rest of the time you are reading.

I have dropped a disk drive or two in the past. If you look at the shock rating, best disk drives have 10G shock rating. That means the drive will tolerate 10 time it's own weight shock, beyond that is no guarantee. If you look at 10G in real life, that's 4 feet drop to a floor. If you look at USB drives, they are rated at 100G or more, conservatively. That means you can literally throw the damn thing and it will survive. Even if the case breaks, the data is safe.

Don't even talk to me about energy consumption comparison and heat generation.

In my opinion, there is no comparison, USB FLASH wins, except for the capacity but as Barry has said, there are SDD (Solid State Drives) coming out with capacities equal to disk drives. They cost a bit more than disk drives but they offer same benefits as FLASH drives.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

I don't think it is quite the no-brainer you think it is. I think the small interface-powered USB drives are quite competitive. They are durable in normal use, cost much less per gigabyte, and don't consume much power. They are pilferable as well, but not quite on the scale of thumb drives.

It is $200.00 or more for 128G on the thumb drive, and $70.00 for a 250G hard drive capacity. That is a 6X difference and rates as more than "a bit more".

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I think this is one of those areas where, sure, SSD is hands-down clearly a better solution than ordinary hard drives, but is it worth the investment? I would bet most people here would improve their show more by spending that extra $200 on mics or signal processing or a larger TV or whatever. Know who will notice those things? The singers! Who notices the difference between a HDD and SSD? Only yourself.

If you really want to make the night a tiny better for yourself, go spend $200 on a really comfortable chair or go mount a mini-fridge in an old amp rack so you can roll cold beer into dry weddings incognito. Seriously, if you have two hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket and you want to buy a new piece of gear, post the stuff you own and I bet I can think of ten better investments than a dumb disk drive that has < 1ms access time.

Let's think about the technical aspect of how your karaoke player works with ZIP files, too. I never understood why so many guys ZIP their music to save a tiny bit of hard drive space, but here is what the program typically does:
1) read the entire ZIP file from disk in order to unzip it
2) CPU does the unzipping
3) temp files blahblah.cdg and blahblah.mp3 get written to the OS write cache
4) player starts
5) real disk write happens from cache

Your karaoke player probably puts that temp file in c:\whatever, maybe you can configure the location, maybe not. So if your only disk is an SSD, then you are going to write something to it every time you play a .ZIP song file. Not that this is really going to be so many writes that the SSD will wear out, but to the person who said writes to it don't happen routinely, well, they probably do in truth. See also: singer history, Windows swap file, web browser cache, etc.

Okay, so that unzip process takes time. Want to know how long it takes compared to a hard drive seek? I don't know how to find out on Windows, but I checked on my Linux computer which has 2.4GHz CPUs, similar to my laptop; and I am assuming the Linux unzip program is roughly as efficient as the Windows one. Also, in this example, the ZIP file was already in the OS cache, so no physical disk read should be necessary.


I hate that song, but it's a pretty long one and the ZIP file is about 9MB. Okay, so it took 151ms to unzip that file, and 124ms of that was the CPU actually doing the work of uncompressing the file. Guess what, that is more than ten times the amount of time it takes the hard drive heads to re-position and start reading a file.

IT TAKES TEN TIMES AS LONG TO UNZIP A FILE AS IT DOES FOR THE HARD DRIVE TO SEEK

Maybe you guys don't ZIP your karaoke files, I dunno, but if you do and you are sitting there going, "hrm, maybe I will buy myself an SSD so my karaoke player will be a tiny bit more responsive," you might want to unzip your music as a first step.

Okay, so on the reliability subject, I see someone said, SSDs and thumb drives are practically invincible compared to hard drives. I guess that is probably true, but I bet you all have at least one backup hard drive anyway, probably one that you bring to your show and one you leave at home. Do you break your hard drives very often? If so I suggest you find a safer way to mount and transport them. And my bet is SSDs are just as vulnerable as HDDs to a KJ's mortal enemy: (cue goofy sound effect) the spilled beer.

Finally, I see another poster already pointed out that SSDs and HDDs are both basically limited in sequential read speed by the USB 2.0 interface, but if you suppose the read happens at 60MByte/sec, then reading in a 9MB Meatloaf.ZIP file takes over 100ms regardless of which physical media it is on.

recap:
HDD seek, ~10ms
sequential read, 100ms+
unzip the file, 100ms+
typical I/O-induced delay in song starting, HDD: 210ms, SDD: 200ms

Oh, and since my post is all pretty abstract and we're talking about milliseconds and crap, the blink of an eye is 300 to 400 milliseconds according to Wikipedia.

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Jeff Wheeler, moonlight DJ/KJ

SSDs are great, but just not the sizes I need right now for a decent price.

Worth noting, my eeePC gets to a usable, logged in, settled down XP desktop in under 15 seconds... Running off an SSD

I use firewire 400 Portable Drives. I have a Lacie and an Iomega, both 320GB. They also have USB but I've found USB to fall out once in a while when I used to DJ, so I've just gone with the Firewire. One cable for power and data, and you can Daisy chain them. I do use a USB2 Sound card instead of going out the headphone jack, and that keeps things on 2 seperate busses.