2 hard drives best for audo recording?

[mancalledaerodynamics]

I've been told that for best results I should have 2 hard drives on my pc - one with all my programs, and one with all the recorded audio. Is this true? I only have one 80 gig hard drive on my pc; a dell 8200 with a 2.2 ghz processor and 512 mb of ram. If I do go ahead and put in a second drive, how will this affect all the stuff I already recorded? Do I leave cubase on the 1st drive, and drag all the audio onto the new one? Will this screw up the directory paths - I think the default folder for recording audio is in the cubase program folder. Definately don't want to reinstall cubase... any thoughts would be helpful...

[MiXit-G]

Its just more space, another hard drive will show on your desktop like a partition on a single drive.

I would'nt bother unless you are running low on room.

[mancalledaerodynamics]

thanks mixit, so having the same hard drive both read and write won't affect the quality or speed of my recordings? If true, I'll spend money on more memory...

[MiXit-G]

Your processor and memory will effect the performance of your PC recording not your HD.

[ALBERTPIKE]

Just added an 2nd drive. Left cubase on C:, just use the new drive for new audio files. Left my old audio files where they were, until I'm done with them. The second drive may help if you have a problem running multiple tracks, but otherwise will not improve sound quality.

[MiXit-G]

Just added an 2nd drive. Left cubase on C:, just use the new drive for new audio files. Left my old audio files where they were, until I'm done with them. The second drive may help if you have a problem running multiple tracks, but otherwise will not improve sound quality.

This also can be acheived by partitioning your existing HD.

[subtractor]

There are other considerations here though. It is nice to have a separate drive for saved data. What happens if your one and only drive say's "fuck you!"? I agree it's not essential. But I disagree that it doesn't make your system more efficient and stable, if not faster.

[ALBERTPIKE]

Yes to all of the above. If you have one drive, you should partition it and keep your audio tracks there. A second drive should make your system more efficient and allow more tracks with fewer glitches, but if you are not having a problem and don't need the space it may not be worth the money. Barring major artifacts due to a malfunction, I don't think the second drive will affect the ultimate sound quality.

[MiXit-G]

There is no substitute for backups!

What if its your second HD that decides to go AWOL!

[ALBERTPIKE]

Originally posted by MiXit-G
There is no substitute for backups!

What if its your second HD that decides to go AWOL!

How do you handle backups?

[MiXit-G]

Burn them.

[prometheuswire]

I think 2 drives is the way to go. My Seagate's have never crapped out on me but my IBM drives have. I couldn't imagine losing hours of recording time to a drive failure. Although unlikely, I think it is worth it. Especially, with how cheap drives are.

Currently, I am using one IDE drive and a USB for backing up. It is also cool because the USB drive is portable and I can share files between multiple machines.

I imagine for performance it really doesn't matter too much because a lot of the program is cached in L2 cache or in memory. I seriously doubt the OS has to do very many page requests to disk.

I suggest getting a Large, 7200, ATA-100 or 133 drive with an 8MB cache (buffer) for your program and data and a cheaper drive for back up.

Courtney