[David@liminal]

I've recently put together a small recording system for the education
institution where I work around an Prism Orpheus interface and a
selection of Schoeps mics. The idea is that tutors can book it and
record anything from rehearsals to small ensemble performances on
their own lap-tops. So far we've all been using our our external HDs
but in the interests of centralizing the recordings for archiving
purposes, we would really like to have a single HD to use on any lap-
top. I've discovered to my disappointment that the orpheus will not
work with a firewire disc as it can't share the firewire bus so this
means we have to use USB2. Should be okay. Am i right though, in
thinking that that the only format both mac and PC will happily work
with is FAT32? I've never used this but it imposes a limit on file
sizes doesn't it? Any advice appreciated.

By the way, for those interested, the orpheus sounds incredible - the
difference from (e.g) a MOTU traveller is something like getting a new
pair of glasses when your prescription is out of date. The software
has proved to be very problematic so far though. With the most recent
updates it's now working smoothly provided you don't try to use more
than one core audio app at a time on a mac (accidentally opening
iTunes (e.g) while running an editing app results in drop outs etc and
I've only managed to get it working properly again following a full re-
start!). The firewire thing is a pain too but for the purposes for
which we bought it (recording acoustic concerts), it's pretty
fantastic.

David

[Chris Hornbeck]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:02:58 -0800 (PST), "David@liminal"
wrote:

I've recently put together a small recording system for the education
institution where I work around an Prism Orpheus interface and a
selection of Schoeps mics. The idea is that tutors can book it and
record anything from rehearsals to small ensemble performances on
their own lap-tops. So far we've all been using our our external HDs
but in the interests of centralizing the recordings for archiving
purposes, we would really like to have a single HD to use on any lap-
top. I've discovered to my disappointment that the orpheus will not
work with a firewire disc as it can't share the firewire bus so this
means we have to use USB2. Should be okay. Am i right though, in
thinking that that the only format both mac and PC will happily work
with is FAT32? I've never used this but it imposes a limit on file
sizes doesn't it? Any advice appreciated.

FAT32 has a 2 Gig file size limit (sometimes expressed as 4 Gig
plus a glitch), but for a general-use system, you'll be facing
this 2 Gig limit in other places anyway.

Truly general use must include lots of users' programs that will
choke on larger files. Multiple-Gig files just aren't a good idea
for lots of reasons.

Much thanks, as always,
Chris Hornbeck

[David@liminal]

On Nov 12, 1:51*am, Chris Hornbeck
wrote:
On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:02:58 -0800 (PST), "David@liminal"

wrote:
I've recently put together a small recording system for the education
institution where I work around an Prism Orpheus interface and a
selection of Schoeps mics. *The idea is that tutors can book it and
record anything from rehearsals to small ensemble performances on
their own lap-tops. *So far we've all been using our our external HDs
but in the interests of centralizing the recordings for archiving
purposes, we would really like to have a single HD to use on any lap-
top. *I've discovered to my disappointment that the orpheus will not
work with a firewire disc as it can't share the firewire bus so this
means we have to use USB2. *Should be okay. *Am i right though, in
thinking that that the only format both mac and PC will happily work
with is FAT32? *I've never used this but it imposes a limit on file
sizes doesn't it? *Any advice appreciated.

FAT32 has a 2 Gig file size limit (sometimes expressed as 4 Gig
plus a glitch), but for a general-use system, you'll be facing
this 2 Gig limit in other places anyway.

Truly general use must include lots of users' programs that will
choke on larger files. Multiple-Gig files just aren't a good idea
for lots of reasons.

Much thanks, as always,
Chris Hornbeck

thanks guys, that's confirmed my reservations. I think it will be
simplest to just have a disc for mac users and a disc for PC users -
the stereo files will all end up on the institutional archive server
anyway.

David

[Anahata]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:26:24 -0500, Soundhaspriority wrote:

FAT32 is a fragile file system, not suitable for archiving.

It's perfectly OK for that, as long as you don't hit the file size limit.
What it's not good for is heavy use with lots of concurrent file system
activity as it's prone to fragmentation and not particulay easy to
recover after a crash or power failure.

FAT32 also has the advantage of wide support as its specification is
freely available.

Use a
utility program to copy the recordings onnto disks that have journaling
file systems

Journaling FS are specifically for protection against corruption in the
event of an unexpected power failure or crash. For a backup or archive
the journaling functionality is redundant.

--
Anahata
==//== 01638 720444
http://www.treewind.co.uk ==//== http://www.myspace.com/maryanahata

[Mike Rivers]

Chris Hornbeck wrote:

FAT32 has a 2 Gig file size limit (sometimes expressed as 4 Gig
plus a glitch), but for a general-use system, you'll be facing
this 2 Gig limit in other places anyway.

Paraphrasing Bill Gates: "360K should be enough for anyone."


--
If you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring and reach
me he
double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo -- I'm really Mike Rivers
)

[Arny Krueger]

"anahata" wrote in message
et
On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:26:24 -0500, Soundhaspriority
wrote:

FAT32 is a fragile file system, not suitable for
archiving.

It's perfectly OK for that, as long as you don't hit the
file size limit. What it's not good for is heavy use with
lots of concurrent file system activity as it's prone to
fragmentation and not particular easy to recover after a
crash or power failure.

FAT32 also has the advantage of wide support as its
specification is freely available.


Furthermore, FAT32 as implemented by most modern USB flash drives has become
something that it was not.

Take a modern 4 GB USB flash drive and plug it into a USB port on a
computer. The computer auto-accesses it, and you can copy files on and off
of the flash drive freely. Nothing special about that, FAT32 has supported
this for years.

Now, even while copying a file onto the USB flash drive, yank it out of its
USB port. Odds are pretty good that at worst, you'll get a warning message
or two.

What's wrong with this picture? Well, if that USB flash drive was a textbook
implementation of FAT32, the drive would now be corrupted. It would probably
be recoverable, but a lengthy scan and fixup would be in order. But, here in
2008, the odds are very good, the drive won't be corrupted. Next time you
plug it in, it will at most be missing the last file you copied onto it.

How can that be?

It turns out that modern flash drives include an intelligent controller that
wraps FAT32 with a journaling file system. So, when you pull it out of the
port and before it is ready the next time you plug it in, it backs out the
last file that was partially copied and leaves the disk whole and ready for
your next usage. This either happens using stored power, or is completed the
next time the drive is plugged in, but before it is made available to you.

[Scott Dorsey]

anahata wrote:
On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:26:24 -0500, Soundhaspriority wrote:

FAT32 is a fragile file system, not suitable for archiving.

It's perfectly OK for that, as long as you don't hit the file size limit.
What it's not good for is heavy use with lots of concurrent file system
activity as it's prone to fragmentation and not particulay easy to
recover after a crash or power failure.

In fact it's pretty good for archiving _because_ it has pretty low overhead.
Likewise the ISO filesystem is very generic, supported by everything from
the Apple II on up to the latest Linux version, and is great for archiving.
Also totally unacceptable for anything else, but that's what it's for.

FAT32 also has the advantage of wide support as its specification is
freely available.

Agreed. NTFS is a freaking nightmare because it's all undocumented so nobody
but Microsoft has an absolute complete implementation of it. The current
implementation that ships with OSX allows reading only, not writing.

BUT! The good news is that OSX comes with FUSE which allows filesystem
support to be very easily codes, and the ntfs3g package will allow OSX to
easily read and write NT filesystems. It seems to be extremely reliable
but you should know the performance isn't very good. It gets better every
day, but it's still slower than a native filesystem.

Use a
utility program to copy the recordings onnto disks that have journaling
file systems

Journaling FS are specifically for protection against corruption in the
event of an unexpected power failure or crash. For a backup or archive
the journaling functionality is redundant.

The good news is that the redundant data in the journal can make it easier
to recover data from a corrupted filesystem in the archive. The bad news
is that the more sophisticated design of the filesystem can make it more
difficult to figure out how to recover data from a corrupted filesystem
in the archive.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[hank alrich]

Arny Krueger wrote:

"anahata" wrote in message
et
On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:26:24 -0500, Soundhaspriority
wrote:

FAT32 is a fragile file system, not suitable for
archiving.

It's perfectly OK for that, as long as you don't hit the
file size limit. What it's not good for is heavy use with
lots of concurrent file system activity as it's prone to
fragmentation and not particular easy to recover after a
crash or power failure.

FAT32 also has the advantage of wide support as its
specification is freely available.


Furthermore, FAT32 as implemented by most modern USB flash drives has become
something that it was not.

Take a modern 4 GB USB flash drive and plug it into a USB port on a
computer. The computer auto-accesses it, and you can copy files on and off
of the flash drive freely. Nothing special about that, FAT32 has supported
this for years.

Now, even while copying a file onto the USB flash drive, yank it out of its
USB port. Odds are pretty good that at worst, you'll get a warning message
or two.

What's wrong with this picture? Well, if that USB flash drive was a textbook
implementation of FAT32, the drive would now be corrupted. It would probably
be recoverable, but a lengthy scan and fixup would be in order. But, here in
2008, the odds are very good, the drive won't be corrupted. Next time you
plug it in, it will at most be missing the last file you copied onto it.

How can that be?

It turns out that modern flash drives include an intelligent controller that
wraps FAT32 with a journaling file system. So, when you pull it out of the
port and before it is ready the next time you plug it in, it backs out the
last file that was partially copied and leaves the disk whole and ready for
your next usage. This either happens using stored power, or is completed the
next time the drive is plugged in, but before it is made available to you.

Thanks for that info, Arny. Even with a few-years-old thumb drive I
noitced my screwups weren't screwing anything up. Now I know why!

--
ha
shut up and play your guitar

[Ty Ford]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:13:52 -0500, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ) :

It turns out that modern flash drives include an intelligent controller that
wraps FAT32 with a journaling file system. So, when you pull it out of the
port and before it is ready the next time you plug it in, it backs out the
last file that was partially copied and leaves the disk whole and ready for
your next usage. This either happens using stored power, or is completed the
next time the drive is plugged in, but before it is made available to you.


I'd be happy if the same USB stick could be read by both PC and Mac.

I guess the "U" stands not for Universal, but for Uncooperative.

Regards,

Ty Ford



--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaPRHMGhGA

[Arny Krueger]

"Ty Ford" wrote in message
al.NET
On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:13:52 -0500, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article
) :

It turns out that modern flash drives include an
intelligent controller that wraps FAT32 with a
journaling file system. So, when you pull it out of the
port and before it is ready the next time you plug it
in, it backs out the last file that was partially copied
and leaves the disk whole and ready for your next usage.
This either happens using stored power, or is completed
the next time the drive is plugged in, but before it is
made available to you.


I'd be happy if the same USB stick could be read by both
PC and Mac.

I guess the "U" stands not for Universal, but for
Uncooperative.

I'm under the impression that Macs can read FAT32 drives.

I can see big problems for those thumb drives with Security software that
only runs under Windows.

[Anahata]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:07:44 -0500, Soundhaspriority wrote:

But the question was about archiving.

Yes...

With a FAT hard
disk, as opposed to the flash drive Arny mentions, a single screw-up by
the user, power loss, machine crash, etc., has a very significant chance
of causing data loss.

If the power goes off or the OS crashes, all the journaling in the world
isn't going to help you. You restart the machine, wipe the archive disk
and start the copy again.

Writing a series of files one after the other, in a single-threaded
process that can be repeated if it goes wrong because they are copies of
files athat already exist, is NOT a challenge for FAT.

And Scott's point about the journaling overheads is that they waste space
that could be used for data.

I wouldn't dream of using FAT for the day-to-day running of my computer
or the server I take care of at work (ext3 on a Linux LVM) but
specifically for an archive copy, FAT is perfectly adequate.

--
Anahata
==//== 01638 720444
http://www.treewind.co.uk ==//== http://www.myspace.com/maryanahata

[Misifus[_2_]]

Arny Krueger wrote:
"Ty Ford" wrote in message
al.NET
On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:13:52 -0500, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article
) :

It turns out that modern flash drives include an
intelligent controller that wraps FAT32 with a
journaling file system. So, when you pull it out of the
port and before it is ready the next time you plug it
in, it backs out the last file that was partially copied
and leaves the disk whole and ready for your next usage.
This either happens using stored power, or is completed
the next time the drive is plugged in, but before it is
made available to you.

I'd be happy if the same USB stick could be read by both
PC and Mac.

I guess the "U" stands not for Universal, but for
Uncooperative.

I'm under the impression that Macs can read FAT32 drives.

I can see big problems for those thumb drives with Security software that
only runs under Windows.




I don't know about FAT32, but my Macs read several thumb drives just
fine. I am cautious about "Ejecting" the drives before I pull them.

-Raf

--
Misifus-
Rafael Seibert

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafiii
home: http://www.rafandsioux.com

[Steve King]

"Misifus" wrote in message
...
| Arny Krueger wrote:
| "Ty Ford" wrote in message
| al.NET
| On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:13:52 -0500, Arny Krueger wrote
| (in article
| ) :
|
| It turns out that modern flash drives include an
| intelligent controller that wraps FAT32 with a
| journaling file system. So, when you pull it out of the
| port and before it is ready the next time you plug it
| in, it backs out the last file that was partially copied
| and leaves the disk whole and ready for your next usage.
| This either happens using stored power, or is completed
| the next time the drive is plugged in, but before it is
| made available to you.
|
| I'd be happy if the same USB stick could be read by both
| PC and Mac.
|
| I guess the "U" stands not for Universal, but for
| Uncooperative.
|
| I'm under the impression that Macs can read FAT32 drives.
|
| I can see big problems for those thumb drives with Security software
that
| only runs under Windows.
|
|
|
|
| I don't know about FAT32, but my Macs read several thumb drives just
| fine. I am cautious about "Ejecting" the drives before I pull them.
|
| -Raf


I'm having no problem carrying wave audio files from my PC based system to
my editor who is using a G5 with Final Cut Pro. He just plugs the memory
stick into the G5 and pulls off the files.

On another note, I have been playing with MacDrive software on my PC, which
allows me to read and write to MAC drives. On the set we transfer P2 files
to a P2 Store Hard Drive. At the end of the day we transfer those files
from the P@ Store drive to a small LaCie drive. I bring that drive back to
my studio, where I move the files to a larger 1 TB drive. Both the small
LaCie and the TB drive are MAC drives, which allows my editor to use them to
update his (my) Terrabyte drives. This way we keep HD files in at least two
places at all times. The MacDrive software is seamless. The MAC drives
simple show up on my Windows Explorer window.

Steve King