5400 RPM hard drive sufficient for tracking?

Whoopysnorp

Whoopysnorp

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I am doing most of my tracking these days on my laptop. I've posted before about various issues I'm having getting it to perform smoothly. The main problem I haven't been able to surmount is getting playback from an external Firewire drive to be glitch-free (when connected to my desktop I can play back multitrack sessions from it just fine). My laptop (Dell Inspiron 1526) has a Ricoh Firewire chipset, which I understand is somewhat notorious for not performing as well as the Lucent or TI chipsets. It seems to work much better to play back multitrack sessions directly from the laptop's internal hard disk. It is only a 5400 RPM hard drive, though. Given that it appears to be working fine so far, is there any reason not to just continue tracking to it as I have been doing, or might there be a negative consequence to doing that that I'm not aware of (aside from the obvious possibility of glitches in playing back complicated sessions)? I would consider replacing the drive with a 7200 RPM one, but if it ain't broke...
 
I've done multitracking (although never more than 4 tracks simultaneously but I'm sure it wasn't maxed out) on a 4200rpm drive in a laptop that I bought in 2004.

More is always better but if it is working for you now, I don't really see the need to upgrade. So keep that money in your pocket.
 
Whoopysnorp said:
I am doing most of my tracking these days on my laptop. I've posted before about various issues I'm having getting it to perform smoothly. The main problem I haven't been able to surmount is getting playback from an external Firewire drive to be glitch-free (when connected to my desktop I can play back multitrack sessions from it just fine). My laptop (Dell Inspiron 1526) has a Ricoh Firewire chipset, which I understand is somewhat notorious for not performing as well as the Lucent or TI chipsets. It seems to work much better to play back multitrack sessions directly from the laptop's internal hard disk. It is only a 5400 RPM hard drive, though.
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I did at least 20-odd tracks on an old 5400 RPM external SCSI desktop drive with a 6MB/sec. bus back in the late 90s. Drives have gotten a lot faster since then....
 
a faster drive couldn't hurt... and they're cheap nowadays... but whether that one will work here i think has to do with how much onboard buffer it has.... this seems to make a big diff when tracking to while playing from... ymmv...
 
If its a laptop 7200 RPM drives are hard to get, however laptops will often offer 8 meg cache buffers on the 5400 which seem to run pretty good. I was able to do 24 tracks ok on mine
 
TerraMortim said:
Precisely. Why settle for less than 7200 rpm? It's not like drives are expensive anymore.
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In a laptop, I'd strongly urge you to go with 5400 over 7200 for cooling reasons. Hard drives don't like heat, and 7200 RPM drives in a laptop enclosure are really pushing the thermal limits....

And realistically for audio, the access pattern approximates a continuous read access pattern. Thus, rotational latency should have almost no effect whatsoever assuming your audio app does sufficient preflighting of buffers and you aren't starved for RAM. As a result, the only thing that should matter is the continuous throughput of the drive.

Since 5400 RPM drives are usually much higher density than 7200 RPM drives, the faster rotationa speed also doesn't necessarily provide much of a win over the 5400 RPM drive in the continuous throughput area, either. The difference in average continuous transfer rates between some models of 160 GB Seagate 5400 and 7200 RPM notebook drives is a mere 6% for reading--- far less than the 33% (or more) that you'd expect. For writing, it is about 15%, which is still paltry. (Source: storagereview.com) In other words, read the performance numbers, not the spindle speed.

So I wouldn't worry at all about 5400. For audio, the faster spindle speed really isn't a big win. For boot times, it can be a huge win... but for track counts... you'd get a lot more mileage out of an extra gig of RAM.
 
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dgatwood said:
In a laptop, I'd strongly urge you to go with 5400 over 7200 for cooling reasons. Hard drives don't like heat, and 7200 RPM drives in a laptop enclosure are really pushing the thermal limits....
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Good point, I hadn't thought of that.

I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing until my sessions start to audibly bog things down. Surely a modern 5400 RPM SATA drive outperforms a 5400 RPM IDE drive from 2001 anyway (and I still base a lot of my rules of thumb regarding DAW stuff on what I learned getting into this around that time).
 
Whoopysnorp said:
Good point, I hadn't thought of that.

I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing until my sessions start to audibly bog things down. Surely a modern 5400 RPM SATA drive outperforms a 5400 RPM IDE drive from 2001 anyway (and I still base a lot of my rules of thumb regarding DAW stuff on what I learned getting into this around that time).
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Yeah. These days 5400 RPM drives can to 40+ MB/sec reading. Not taking any off for overhead, that's 145.6 simultaneous tracks reading... at 96 kHz/24-bit.... The write speed is on the order of two-thirds that. You're not going to run into a performance wall with any modern hard drive unless your DAW sucks. When I was doing over 20 tracks, I emphasize again that the the drive was at most a little over a tenth as fast... maybe less than that. And I never ran into a wall because of disk performance. CPU performance, yeah, but not disk performance.
 
dgatwood said:
In a laptop, I'd strongly urge you to go with 5400 over 7200 for cooling reasons. Hard drives don't like heat, and 7200 RPM drives in a laptop enclosure are really pushing the thermal limits....
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Indeed - I use a macbook, and it's usually not too far from the sound source. It came with a 5400 RPM drive. I upgraded to a 7200 (mostly because I needed the space - the RPMs were a bonus, I thought), and found that the extra heat caused the laptop fan to engage more, which screwed up my tracks. Then the new drive failed :mad:, so I put back in the old one (and cleaned out the junk) - back in business, and I don't notice a difference in performance.

Yes, in the unusual event that I get DAW choke when tracking, it's because I was simultaneously playing tracks with a bunch of plugins, and tanked the CPU.
 
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