For all of you wannabe system builders...

wheelema

wheelema

Boner-obo
Came across some very interesting observations...

The WD Raptors are super-fast and reliable, but can add a lot of heat to your system, which is why I tend to hold off on the Raptor unless it’s a system that really needs the 10,000 rpm.
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...and...

Today’s 7,200 and 10,000 rpm hard drives release an incredible amount of heat. Keeping your hard drives cool is critical for both hard drive integrity and system stability. You should never install two hard drives in adjacent bays – leave space in-between. Well designed cases with the front intake fan blowing over the hard drive bays make HDD placement even easier. Since standard fans have a central portion where air does not move well, I usually have my hard drives at the top edge and bottom edge of my fan, ensuring that the drive receives the maximum amount of cooling. Also recall that heat rises and so the lower drive will usually run cooler than drive above. With good cooling, you’ll be able to maintain both drives with super reliability, but recall that the difference of five degrees can be a difference of 10 to 15% failure rate, and if it’s your hard drive that fails, that’s 100% to you.
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...also...

With IDE, drives always are controlled by the slowest controller on the channel. That is to say that even though IDE controllers cannot simultaneously access two devices (which SCSI can), a setup where you have your HDD on master and your DVD-R as slave will be slower than having them as the master drive on two different channels.
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To rephrase this advice, when you have two devices on a single IDE cable, and one of them is significantly slower than the other (in this example the DVD moves slow and the HDD moves fast), than both will move at the slowest throughput. Yoke your HDD together, and your optical drives together.

...and last but not least...

Video cards, particularly today’s high-speed GPUs emit a lot of radio frequency interference (RFI) that can interfere with your sound card’s performance by adding extra noise and buzz. For that reason, you always want to install your sound card in the PCI slot as far as possible from the video card in order to maximize audio quality. It’s a simple intervention that’s missed by many.
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Here is the complete article.
 
Video cards, particularly today’s high-speed GPUs emit a lot of radio frequency interference (RFI) that can interfere with your sound card’s performance by adding extra noise and buzz. For that reason, you always want to install your sound card in the PCI slot as far as possible from the video card in order to maximize audio quality. It’s a simple intervention that’s missed by many.
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..I KNEW IT I KNEW IT!. i'm hearing buzzing now with the onboard soundcard on here
 
wheelema said:
Came across some very interesting observations......and......also...To rephrase this advice, when you have two devices on a single IDE cable, and one of them is significantly slower than the other (in this example the DVD moves slow and the HDD moves fast), than both will move at the slowest throughput. Yoke your HDD together, and your optical drives together.
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Many points are overgeneralized and offer easy remedy (good active or even better excellent passive cooling)


Video cards, particularly today?s high-speed GPUs emit a lot of radio frequency interference (RFI) that can interfere with your sound card?s performance by adding extra noise and buzz. For that reason, you always want to install your sound card in the PCI slot as far as possible from the video card in order to maximize audio quality. It?s a simple intervention that?s missed by many.
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This is empty declaration where in reality your main priority specially in PC, is to choose the least shared PCI port and in most of the MBO's those are at best only the 2 PCI ports.

So if this is the first one, kiss your AGP or PCI-E bye bye?, no, you try always as more dedicated out box as you can, if not, you try the best you can. And if you can afford, this buys all the silence in the world : http://www.mobl.com/expansion/

PC is by definition a home/office machine, environment not audio friendly by nature of internal associated problems. With right PSU (and even they exist as passive solutions) , as much as possible, more passive then active cooling (active only to blow out hot air) and you already made some foundation for less problems.

Buy dedicated graphic card, those created for pro environment like Matrox, don't keep gaming cards and you'll be surprised how your machine is possible to become audio friendly :)

* http://www.quietpc.com/ *
* http://www.teschke.de/ *
* http://www.caseking.de/shop/catalog/default.php?cPath=33&osCsid=f96cb5dcc9e348744ebf1973cb357fa2 *
* http://www.frontosa.co.za/html/Zalman/Zalman2HC2.htm *
 
About the IDE chain being limited to the slowest drive on the chain: this is not always the case. On older chipsets, I have seen this occur by running hd_speed and access time benchmarks on the drives in the same IDE chain... the throughput would not suffer terribly, but the latency was bad.

In newer chipsets, this should not happen. I have tested this by putting a 7200rpm HDD and a 12x CD-burner on the same chain. ran tests, removed cd drive, ran tests.
Results: almost no difference (the only difference in this case would be ATA protocol overhead).


As far as raptors and other HD releasing a lot of heat, this is true for the most part. I always separate my drives by at least one space, plus, I have 2 very quiet 80mm fans drawing air across all 5 drives.

Video Card: I have a GeForce 6800GT with no issues relating to noise whatsoever. Stick with AGP. Any PCI device will send out hardware interrupt requests to the CPU whenevr it is connected. Hardware interrupts essentially limit your CPU to only pay attention to PCI devices for a moment = shit latency when you are tracking/mixing. In short, the more PCI devices, the more you are asking for your CPU to be busy with these interrupts. Dont use any PCI cards except for the ones that you must use for audio I/O. Especially ATI TV tuner cards... dont get me started on that steaming pile of PCB-flavored shit.
 
I would simply avoid IDE completely when building a new system. Easier said than doen on a budget. However, it can be done.

Go with SATA HD's, and even a SATA DVD Burner for backups and whatnot. Makes the internal cabling much easier, cleaner, and gives faster operation.

But, yes, cooling is a big problem with many of the high-rpm drives. But don't forget that half of your cooling system depends on the placement of your computer in the room, not just the internal airflow. Both are important. I've had a customer use an automobile fan to feed his internal fans, and another one to disperse heat. In an open area, it's drafty and noisy, but if you're recirding from an isolated area, incredible for cooling.
 
(By the way, since we're talking hard drives, I recommend getting a hardware RAID controlled capable of running RAID 5. Permanent backup, and faster access to the harddrive.)
 
Kore said:
(By the way, since we're talking hard drives, I recommend getting a hardware RAID controlled capable of running RAID 5. Permanent backup, and faster access to the harddrive.)
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Good idea, but expensive to find a dedicated (not driver-based) solution.
 
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