Second Hard Drive.

[Atom Bomb]

I recently 'upgraded' from a laptop to a desktop model. I am running Reaper 4 on Windows XP. this machine is pretty stripped down and it's only purpose is recording. Only internet if i need to D/L updates or whatever. No browsing at all.

It has it's purpose.

One thing i have read is to have a second hard drive for my files. Just leave the C drive for the OS and software.

In theory i can see where recording and saving and all that junk to another dedicated drive would make alot of sense.

Does anyone do this? Do you notice a difference in performance? What are things i should consider when looking at adding an additional hard drive? Does it have to be on board or USB? I think on board makes more sense for performance.

Do the RPM's have to be the same on both drives? Could my second drive be 10000 rpm's and my Cdrive 7200?
Do they have to both be formatted the same?

 

[Steenamaroo]

Hey.
Nah, it's not as fussy as that.

I don't like using USB for real time stuff, like loading sessions from it. I'll use a USB hard drive for safety backups or for moving stuff just.

If you buy a drive to fit inside the computer, there's very little to get wrong.
You gotta know if your computer uses IDE or SATA connection. It's pretty much always SATA these days.

Speed wise, buy what you want but I wouldn't go less than 7200.
You can get a 7200 or 10k mechanical drive, or better yet a solid state drive. The latter is super fast but very pricey.
Honestly, a 7200k drive is fine for 99% of situations.

For formatting, I guess you'd go NTFS. That's the standard file system on m$ computers.


I don't know that you'd see much of a performance increase, at least not in day to day use.
You'll certainly raise the limit of how much data your DAW can read and write at any given time.
If you ever get pauses or halts in your DAW due to not reading/writing fast enough, that'll go away.


For me the top benefit is that you can pull the drive out and plug it into any other computer if the worst happens to you.