2 hard drives best for audo recording?

M

mancalledaerodynamics

New member
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...
 
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.
 
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...
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top