second hard drive

[auburncatfish]

I just got and installed an 80 gig hard drive into my computer for music purposes. My primary hd is a smaller 12 gigs. The 80 gig as now is my slave.

Can I set Cakewalk Sonar 2 up so that it saves to my 80 gig slave rather than my 12 gig primary? Thanks! btw - windows 2K.

Andrew.

[KingstonRock]

yes you can, you go to options->global and then go to the folders tab, and set it for a folder on your 80gb hardrive

also, you should plug in the harddrives such that the main system drive and audio drive are on different ide channels. The system can only access one device per channel at any given instant, so the audio hard drive and system hard drive cant be accessed at the same time if they are on the same channel, therefore defeating the purpose of having two drives. Just hookup the cables, and adjust the jumpers, so that the system drive is the master on the primary ide channel and your first optical drive is its slave, and your audio drive is the master for the second ide channel, and your second optical drive, if you have is its slave.

Eric

[auburncatfish]

Thanks Eric, I got it running now the way I want in terms of hard drives. The rest of it is another ball of wax. Keep chugin' and thanks!

[dachay2tnr]

Originally posted by auburncatfish
My primary hd is a smaller 12 gigs. The 80 gig as now is my slave.

Auburn - it would be preferable to set up the 2nd HD as the master on IDE2 rather than as a slave on IDE1. Putting them on the same controller sort of defeats the purpose of having a dedicated audio HD.

Edit: Sorry Kingston, I should have read your reply more fully. Looks like you already gave him that same advice. My apologies.

[vicevursa]

Auburn - it would be preferable to set up the 2nd HD as the master on IDE2 rather than as a slave on IDE1. Putting them on the same controller sort of defeats the purpose of having a dedicated audio HD.

I haven't heard that before, it makes sense, but how much difference does it make?


Vice

[Jagular]

Originally posted by auburncatfish
I just got and installed an 80 gig hard drive into my computer for music purposes. My primary hd is a smaller 12 gigs. The 80 gig as now is my slave.

Can I set Cakewalk Sonar 2 up so that it saves to my 80 gig slave rather than my 12 gig primary? Thanks! btw - windows 2K.

Andrew.

I just did the exact same thing except I first hooked up my 80 GB HD as slave and made an exact replica of my 12 GB HD on that. Then I made the 80 GB HD master, booted up to make sure it worked and erased everything on the 12 GB HD. I now use the 12 GB for automated data backups and it works great.

But for your purposes, I defer to the two suggestions prior.

[pdlstl]

Originally posted by KingstonRock
also, you should plug in the harddrives such that the main system drive and audio drive are on different ide channels. The system can only access one device per channel at any given instant, so the audio hard drive and system hard drive cant be accessed at the same time if they are on the same channel, therefore defeating the purpose of having two drives.
Eric

In addition to my internal 60GB IDE drive, I have an 80GB external Firewire drive (7200). Because it's Firewire, does this mean that the internal IDE and external Firewire drive can be accessed simultaneously?

Thanks,

Earl

[dachay2tnr]

Originally posted by vicevursa
I haven't heard that before, it makes sense, but how much difference does it make?


Vice

The key, Vice, is that when you have your drives on separate controllers, you can do simultaneous read-writes to both drives. So if your audio is streaming from the audio-only drive, and Windows decides to do some housekeeping stuff at the same time, the Windows activity will occur on the main drive and won't interfere with the audio being streamed from the other drive.

If you have them on the same controller the instructions for both drives have to go through the same controller and one can interfere with the other.

[KingstonRock]

In addition to my internal 60GB IDE drive, I have an 80GB external Firewire drive (7200). Because it's Firewire, does this mean that the internal IDE and external Firewire drive can be accessed simultaneously?

yes, the computer sees that drive as a firewire device first, and then a hard drive, just as it sees internal cd-roms and hard drives as ide devices first

[vicevursa]

Thanks Dachay, I understand. It's basically to let windows do it's thing to avoid meesing up mine!


Vice

[pdlstl]

Thanks KRock!

[auburncatfish]

dachay2tnr- Thanks for your advice. I really should switch them around, it's a bit laziness.

What interference could be caused by having them on the same controller like you said?

[dachay2tnr]

What interference could be caused by having them on the same controller like you said?

You could end up having dropouts in your audio because the audio playback from the hdd gets interupted by the computer trying to do something else at the same time. Most likely you will see it as you start pushing the limits of your system, where the audio needs a lot of resources and suddenly some of the available resources are busy on another mission.

It's not a big deal and you'll be OK as is. But if you want to best optimise two hard drives for audio, they should be on separate controllers. Having them on the same controller is not much different than having a single hard drive - except you have more storage space.

[auburncatfish]

That's what I figured, but it still would be good to switch it now, before I start acruing files and gigabytes that I might nuc in the process. Thanks again.