Hard drive for recording, what to look for?
- Thread starter J Wah
- Start date
Gidge
Lapdance Test Dummy
the Western Digital I had sucked big time.....the Maxtor Diamond Max I replaced it with rocks.....some people here swear they never had problems with their WD HD, but Ive heard way more horror stories than sucess stories......
other than 7200rpm, their isnt much more to look for....the bigger the better......
other than 7200rpm, their isnt much more to look for....the bigger the better......
I have lost two WD drives. and will never buy one again. But never a Seagate, I think their stuff is good. Didn't all the drive manufacturers buy each other some time back? I think there's only really like 2 companies now. But anyway, I love IBM hard drives nowadays, though I've heard the new Fujitsu drives are pretty screaming... but who buys those? Just avoid WD and get something between 40-200 GB and you should be fine.
I work with this stuff day after day, so it's IMHO. Of all the drives, WD and Seagate (for IDE, their SCSI stuff is ok) tend to fail most. Spec-wise the WD stuff is close enough to the competition, but as far as reliability, I can only base that on my experiences with them which haven't been spectacular.
Charger, Quantum and Maxtor merged recently. Fujitsu and IBM are still seperate companies. Fujitsu makes good drives as well, forgot about them. I haven't tried their 7200 RPM models but I wouldn't doubt they are decent. - EDIT - looks like fujitsu is out of the IDE drive game. Too bad.
Charger, Quantum and Maxtor merged recently. Fujitsu and IBM are still seperate companies. Fujitsu makes good drives as well, forgot about them. I haven't tried their 7200 RPM models but I wouldn't doubt they are decent. - EDIT - looks like fujitsu is out of the IDE drive game. Too bad.
kristian
New member
the new IBMs, the 80Gb and 60Gb variety have recently been conking out. I was reading and IBM is admiting fault in the batches of failed ones. What they described is a scratching sound randomly coming fromt he drive, then it dying. I've heard that sound from my recently purchased 40Gb Seagate, and the 3rd time i heard the sound from it i was reading the article about all the people with messed up hard drives.. i get to the sound description and mine starts doing it. 
you can bet to hell i was glad it was still underwarranty, i got my money back and im sticking with my single 20Gb right now. whew, i think my new one was going to go kaput in about a month.
you can bet to hell i was glad it was still underwarranty, i got my money back and im sticking with my single 20Gb right now. whew, i think my new one was going to go kaput in about a month.hey i was looking into getting a 100gig hard drive just for recording. should i? or should i just get 2 40gig's or something like that. i have a 1.4igig athlon w/ 512megs or ram. i will be getting it cheaper than the avg. price of a 40 or 60gig hard drive under $120,o it is a 7200rpm also.
First thing to check would be the sustained transfer speed, not peak, then you only measure the buffer. The higher that one the better. Next the random access time and noise.
I prefer two smaller ones to one very large. If one large fails, you loose a lot of data, you seldom loose half a drive. Also some programs like CEP use temp files for recording/playback the actual project. this means that each file has to be transfered from the place where it is kept to the temp files. It is a lot quicker if those are on different drives.
Using IBM at the moment (DDYS range). Happy with them, but hot (in my pc at least).
I prefer two smaller ones to one very large. If one large fails, you loose a lot of data, you seldom loose half a drive. Also some programs like CEP use temp files for recording/playback the actual project. this means that each file has to be transfered from the place where it is kept to the temp files. It is a lot quicker if those are on different drives.
Using IBM at the moment (DDYS range). Happy with them, but hot (in my pc at least).
Slackmaster2K
Gone
As many of you know I can't stand WD drives. I've had quite a number fail in an environment consisting of numerous drives from numerous manufacturers.
The most reliable and fast drives that I've used have come from Maxtor, which now owns Quantum. I've had good experience in the past with Quantum as well. Lots of people like IBM, but man they had a bad spell there about a year ago.
Here's some fun information:
IBM drives and HighPoint HPT366 controllers (like the controller on the Abit BE6-II), and perhaps other HighPoint controllers...is NOT a good combination. You will see random data corruption after weeks or months.
Maxtor drives and some Promise controllers, namely the one built into the Asus A7V133 (damn, which controller is it?), and Windows 2000....is NOT a good combination, but it can work if you a) install the latest BIOS upgrade for your mobo/controller b) install the latest via 4in1 drivers c) Install Win2k SP2.
As far as specs go:
7200RPM is really all you need to look for. Sustained transfer will vary from drive to drive, even within drives of the same model. I have one Maxtor that does around 25MB/sec sustained read/write, and another that does 15MB/sec write and 35MB/sec read. It all works out. Seek times will vary from as low as 7ms to 9.5ms or so, but don't sweat it too much. I've also found noise ratings to be meaningless, as all drive manufacturers claim that their drives are quite, when it really varies from drive to drive. The type of sound, the amount of sound...just hope you get lucky or have a setup in which it doesn't matter.
Consider this: a single 24bit / 44.1khz track (a recommended resolution) consumes 132,300 bytes per second. Let's say you get a bummer drive or bummer controller and your sustained read/write speed is 15MB/sec. 15,000,000 / 132,300 = 113 tracks. Of course that's a theoretical "perfect" number. So let's halve that value as a guesstimate as to performance in a live multitracking environment: 56 tracks. That sounds about reasonable for a good hard drive. The problem is, however, that the rest of your system is going to choke well before you get to 56 tracks....typically between 24 and 32. This is why hard drive selection in terms of speed has become less of an issue with modern 7200RPM drives. They're fast enough and don't suffer the recalibration issues of older drives. It used to be that hard drive selection was one of the most crucial decisions; now it's limited primarily to CPU, motherboard/chipset, and soundcard selection....which makes it seem like things have gotten easier...yeah right.
Slackmaster 2000
The most reliable and fast drives that I've used have come from Maxtor, which now owns Quantum. I've had good experience in the past with Quantum as well. Lots of people like IBM, but man they had a bad spell there about a year ago.
Here's some fun information:
IBM drives and HighPoint HPT366 controllers (like the controller on the Abit BE6-II), and perhaps other HighPoint controllers...is NOT a good combination. You will see random data corruption after weeks or months.
Maxtor drives and some Promise controllers, namely the one built into the Asus A7V133 (damn, which controller is it?), and Windows 2000....is NOT a good combination, but it can work if you a) install the latest BIOS upgrade for your mobo/controller b) install the latest via 4in1 drivers c) Install Win2k SP2.
As far as specs go:
7200RPM is really all you need to look for. Sustained transfer will vary from drive to drive, even within drives of the same model. I have one Maxtor that does around 25MB/sec sustained read/write, and another that does 15MB/sec write and 35MB/sec read. It all works out. Seek times will vary from as low as 7ms to 9.5ms or so, but don't sweat it too much. I've also found noise ratings to be meaningless, as all drive manufacturers claim that their drives are quite, when it really varies from drive to drive. The type of sound, the amount of sound...just hope you get lucky or have a setup in which it doesn't matter.
Consider this: a single 24bit / 44.1khz track (a recommended resolution) consumes 132,300 bytes per second. Let's say you get a bummer drive or bummer controller and your sustained read/write speed is 15MB/sec. 15,000,000 / 132,300 = 113 tracks. Of course that's a theoretical "perfect" number. So let's halve that value as a guesstimate as to performance in a live multitracking environment: 56 tracks. That sounds about reasonable for a good hard drive. The problem is, however, that the rest of your system is going to choke well before you get to 56 tracks....typically between 24 and 32. This is why hard drive selection in terms of speed has become less of an issue with modern 7200RPM drives. They're fast enough and don't suffer the recalibration issues of older drives. It used to be that hard drive selection was one of the most crucial decisions; now it's limited primarily to CPU, motherboard/chipset, and soundcard selection....which makes it seem like things have gotten easier...yeah right.
Slackmaster 2000
