How important is hard drive speed in this day and age?

I do know of the restore from image, but have never cared for the option, usually I will want to repartition the HD from the original or do something different.

OP, if you are on Windows, Samsung and WD provide a utility with their drives. Otherwise, just check out what is out there. Whatever you do, avoid doing a reinstall unless you need to clean things up. Then a clean install could improve system performance as well.
 
jonny deep said:
Until all the updates have been installed, then it will slow right down again!
Click to expand...

I have a system just for music, have most of the updates, I haven't really seen issues like in the past. This on both 7 and 8. Seems MS has improved their update roll outs and not created more issues in the last 5-6 years.
 
Woah. So much to respond to.

Steenamaroo: I am considering switching to a mac. Yes, I would only be using it for making music. I would probably run a browser and some other online crud like Dropbox, but Music would be it's only job. My wife has her macbook for her photography. My projects are usually Ez drummer, between 2 to 5 guitars tracks, bass, 2 to 4 tracks of vocals and ideally some effects bussses. nothing major. Plus all your standard processing effects. Definitely not going to be scoring any orchestrated soundtracks or 30 tracks of synths and stuff. I might upgrade from Ezdrummer to superior drummer? I wanted to explore a little bit of Amplitube Guitar sims? Maybe?

I was going to see if there was something in refurbished / clearance section on the apple.ca online store and there seems to be a few options available in my price range for the 21.5inch. I looked again last night and that model is just a 5400 Rpm hard drive. no Fusion drive. So that was my mistake.

I really could care less about the mac displays. If i could get a workhorse macmini that would be awesome i'd sooner spend the money on mac guts then mac displays but i don't really see alot of wiggle room for configuration on those mac minis. ???

I was also under the impression that with macs the phrase "it is what it is" rings pretty true. But you say you can upgrade hard drives and ram and junk in those things?


DM60: I think a clean reinstall of my OS and all that crap might be a good bandaid for my headaches right now, but it is a Windows XP machine with some old AMD processor and it really bottlenecks and hangs so badly after i add a couple compressors and reverbs that it would be wasted effort. Maybe i read your reply wrong but the suggestion was a good one just not one that i think is going to help in the grand scheme of things.

For example, I have XP tweaked and running the bare minium amount of processes and with nothing else open or running When i open my sound cloud page to listen to music it takes a song upwards of a minute to load and it just chatters incessantly once it starts playing.

Simply Put, upgrade is imminent.
 
ShanPeyton said:
Woah. So much to respond to.

Steenamaroo: I am considering switching to a mac. Yes, I would only be using it for making music. I would probably run a browser and some other online crud like Dropbox, but Music would be it's only job. My wife has her macbook for her photography. My projects are usually Ez drummer, between 2 to 5 guitars tracks, bass, 2 to 4 tracks of vocals and ideally some effects bussses. nothing major. Plus all your standard processing effects. Definitely not going to be scoring any orchestrated soundtracks or 30 tracks of synths and stuff. I might upgrade from Ezdrummer to superior drummer? I wanted to explore a little bit of Amplitube Guitar sims? Maybe?

I was going to see if there was something in refurbished / clearance section on the apple.ca online store and there seems to be a few options available in my price range for the 21.5inch. I looked again last night and that model is just a 5400 Rpm hard drive. no Fusion drive. So that was my mistake.

I really could care less about the mac displays. If i could get a workhorse macmini that would be awesome i'd sooner spend the money on mac guts then mac displays but i don't really see alot of wiggle room for configuration on those mac minis. ???

I was also under the impression that with macs the phrase "it is what it is" rings pretty true. But you say you can upgrade hard drives and ram and junk in those things?
Click to expand...

Ok, thanks for the info.

What you describe doesn't sound especially intensive. I suspect you'd get by just fine with the built in hard drive.
Generally speaking you'd have your sessions on a separate disk anyway, although I've gotten by with the system disk just fine on many occasions.

If you bought a mac mini or a macbook pro, hard drive replacement would be very easy, should you ever want/need to do it.
iMacs are a little more tricky. Don't get me wrong...I could still do one in 10-15 mins, but the average computer user might not want to.

You can upgrade the ram and hard drive in any mac.

For what it's worth, I ran a 2011 mac book pro, albeit with SSD, as my main computer for a few years, and did some pretty heavy sessions!
I just used a thunderbolt/dvi adapter and plugged it into my screen with bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
When I left I'd just unplug it and take it with me.

I did buy a mac pro but only because I think I'm going to be doing bits of video editing and gaming here and there, and I wanted a dedicated computer for convenience.
If graphics power for gaming isn't a big deal to you, I'd shop for a used mini or book pro.
Chances are you'll get a 2011/2012 in great shape on eBay, with an SSD, within your budget.
It's kind depressing how much my macbook pro is worth now. :(
Look for 2.3/2.5ghz i5 or better.

Don't worry about the 'music only' thing. It's a mac. Use it as your day to day computer too if you want.
There's no real reason not to.
 
ShanPeyton said:
DM60: I think a clean reinstall of my OS and all that crap might be a good bandaid for my headaches right now, but it is a Windows XP machine with some old AMD processor and it really bottlenecks and hangs so badly after i add a couple compressors and reverbs that it would be wasted effort. Maybe i read your reply wrong but the suggestion was a good one just not one that i think is going to help in the grand scheme of things.

For example, I have XP tweaked and running the bare minium amount of processes and with nothing else open or running When i open my sound cloud page to listen to music it takes a song upwards of a minute to load and it just chatters incessantly once it starts playing.

Simply Put, upgrade is imminent.
Click to expand...

Now, sounds like you could have serious hardware issues. We started with just a hard drive. Even if you could retrieve data faster on your current machine, not sure how the other resources are going to hold up.

Probably should start from scratch, talk about your system specs, what you are trying to do, etc. A new hard drive may not help your current situation. SSD or not.
 
DM60 said:
Now, sounds like you could have serious hardware issues. We started with just a hard drive. Even if you could retrieve data faster on your current machine, not sure how the other resources are going to hold up.

Probably should start from scratch, talk about your system specs, what you are trying to do, etc. A new hard drive may not help your current situation. SSD or not.
Click to expand...

Admittedly I skimmed the part about your windows box and assumed upgrade was a cert, but maybe we can help you get the old machine back into better health?
It might be worth a clean install on a clean drive to test, if for nothing else.
 
DM60 said:
Now, sounds like you could have serious hardware issues. We started with just a hard drive. Even if you could retrieve data faster on your current machine, not sure how the other resources are going to hold up.

Probably should start from scratch, talk about your system specs, what you are trying to do, etc. A new hard drive may not help your current situation. SSD or not.
Click to expand...

Oh, in my current machine (which your assertations are correct it is crap hardware) i have two 7200RPM hard drives. I should have been more clear. Sorry man. My bad. I was inquiring about the slower hard drive for shopping purposes. If i were to build a PC like i originally intended i would never stick a slow drive in a machine. Ever.

Just when it comes to that foreign realm of Apple, i was curious if it was that big of a deal given the technology these days.
 
This is more a history lesson than much else. When I was doing digital audio recording for radio in the mid-90's there was a problem with standard "business class" hard drives. They did a "thermal re-calibration" of the writing head about every 7 minutes. Not a problem with saving a document, but it sure screwed up audio!

I cut a deal with Maxtor to use their new "A/V compatible" drive in exchange for credit mentions on the show. That's because a 550 MB A/V drive was $1,000!!!

Today, any stock hard drive can be used with Adobe Audition, etc for simple recording and editing and simple mixing. The use of a second drive for temp files created when copying/pasting etc. is recommended to speed things up, but I've done 100's of one-hour shows on a stock HP laptop when running a station.

But if you are going beyond news interviews or editing podcasts, I'd be curious to know what happens when you try a stock drive.
 
jonny deep said:
Windows has imaging software built in. When you put the windows disk in, you can restore from an image (either from a local or network drive).
Click to expand...

So I would move my current C:drive to another slot and point the new drive to it to retrieve the data?
 
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/166172/EN-US

For those of you that don't like to check facts, and those that are still wondering whether or not Windows comes with backup software, Windows has had built-in backup software since the 90's, and because these operating systems were based on MS-DOS, perhaps you could do the same with earlier versions of Windows, such as 3.1, and MS-DOS as well!

Also, keep in mind that built-in software isn't always the best for the job, and that goes for both Windows and Mac OS!
 
c7sus said:
So I would move my current C:drive to another slot and point the new drive to it to retrieve the data?
Click to expand...

Click "Start". Where it reads "Search programs and files", type "backup". You should now see results. In the results, under "Programs", click "Backup and Restore". The Control Panel window will pop up and you'll see "Create a system image" on the left-hand side. Click on it. Follow the prompts...
 
spikemtz said:
Click "Start". Where it reads "Search programs and files", type "backup". You should now see results. In the results, under "Programs", click "Backup and Restore". The Control Panel window will pop up and you'll see "Create a system image" on the left-hand side. Click on it. Follow the prompts...
Click to expand...

That is for Windows 7. For Windows 8, I have to ask, "WHY ARE YOU USING WINDOWS 8?"

Just kidding... Anyways, here's a link that tells you how to find the utility in Windows 8: What happened to Backup and Restore? - Windows Help
 
radi0j0hn said:
Today, any stock hard drive can be used with Adobe Audition, etc for simple recording and editing and simple mixing. The use of a second drive for temp files created when copying/pasting etc. is recommended to speed things up, but I've done 100's of one-hour shows on a stock HP laptop when running a station.
Click to expand...


These days, I wouldn't bother with a second drive unless you use it as your boot drive, to make the system boot faster, to make apps launch faster, to make VIs load faster, etc.

I used to do multitracking on a hard drive that got something like 6 MB/sec. Bouncing and freezing was sometimes useful even at 48 kHz/16-bit. By the time drives got to about 30 MB/sec. (somewhere around the turn of the century, IIRC), I pretty much never worried about drive speed again, even with three dozen tracks. At 96 kHz, 24-bit, you get three tracks per MB/sec. That translates to several hundred tracks on a modern 5400 RPM drive.

Yeah, the rotational latency matters for some things, like booting, loading apps, etc. And in theory, that could cause playback to stutter, but in practice, it is mindlessly simple to look several seconds ahead, ensure that everything is buffered before playback begins, and ensure that the in-memory buffer stays that far ahead of the current playback position, using as much RAM as is needed. With that in mind, given that most machines have many, many gigabytes of RAM, IMO, any app that stutters because of something as trivially avoidable as HD latency is a badly written app.
 
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