Computer Parts

Chris Fallen

Chris Fallen

New member
Hey, I'm just working on building my new computer, like every other schmo in here.

So far I have:

Motherboard: ABIT IC7
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 / 2.4 GHz
Hard Drive (OS): Seagate 40GB 7200 rpm EIDE 2MB Cache
Hard Drive (Files): Seagate 120GB 7200 rpm EIDE 8MB Cache
RAM:
DVD RW:
Power Supply: Zalman ZM400A-APF 400W ATX


I want a gig of ram. I was curious as to what type I should go for. Crucial? Mushkin?

Also, who makes good dvd writers? I think back in the day LiteOn made good cd writers. Should I go there for DVD, too?
 
I would go with crucial, kingston or micron ram sticks.
I've used Kingston for a couple years now with no problems.
I like the new Hyper 3200 ram sticks....very nice !
 
Instead of the 120 GB, I'd get (2) 60 GB 8mb drives and a RAID-0 card. You'd spend another $65 or so to do it, but it's worth it. If money's a prob I'd dump 512 mb of the memory and go for the faster hard disk setup.
 
DAFFYDRUNK said:
Instead of the 120 GB, I'd get (2) 60 GB 8mb drives and a RAID-0 card. You'd spend another $65 or so to do it, but it's worth it. If money's a prob I'd dump 512 mb of the memory and go for the faster hard disk setup.
Click to expand...
I definately wouldn't do that. Single drives are plenty fast for recording and will potentially save you some headaches. And cutting back on the RAM will just create another bottleneck to bump in to.
 
Sorry to disagree. My 80 GB drive can't keep up with my 45 track acid song I just did. Doesn't matter if I have 256 MB or 1 GB memory it in it. The difference in running it all out with all fx enabled is Raid 0 on a couple 20 GB 7200 drives I have. 512 MB is plenty of memory for most DAW stuff. I would rather have RAID 0 and 512 MB then no RAID and 1 GB memory.
 
I think your problem lies somewhere else.

Read this article: http://www.prorec.com/prorec/articles.nsf/files/FB6EAECAE4AECE82862568D20005C6C1
It's a review from April 2000 on the Motu 24i and the reviewer puts it to the test by tracking 32 tracks (24/44.1) simultaneously. Without a hitch. Even on a 5400rpm drive.
Again: April 2000. In computer years that's decades ago.
If you can't do 45 on a (fairly) new 80GB drive, I think there is something wrong.
 
True, but my theory is the CPU time required to hit the IDE HHD is causing some sort of Acid buffer underun. Tried using cacheman and tweaking buffer sizes ect to fix it. With the RAID setup it dumps faster and I don't get into a situation where the IDE controller is taking too much clock time away from the CPU having to process the fx for a ton of different stuff. (and yes DMA is fully enabled) Anyway, when I've had people want me to build em DAW or AV stuff I've always erred on the side of having the fastest disk performance since it makes loading/editing/ect run smoother. Now if there was a way to preload as much of the song into memory, that would be cool, but imagine loading ~800 MB into memory. Even with a fastest 8MB IDE it might take 30+ seconds to load.
 
technically speaking DAFFYDRUNK is absolutely correct however i have found 2 caveats:

1) if either one of your RAID 0 drives goes back you are screwed. you have double the chance of a driver problem in a RAID 0 configuration. you would have to go RAID 0+1 and use 3 drives. slightly slower performance, but better recovery.

2) in theory RAID 0 is faster, but i stopped using RAID 0 about a year ago and have not noticed a difference during PLAYBACK. if have however, noticed a difference when recording additional tracks after i've got about 32 full tracks recorded.

since i normally loop my drum and background vocals, having the memory for the FX is more important than having the disk speed.
 
What I do with the raid is have a bootable primary HDD that's at least 20 GB larger than the array. For example, a pro tools machine I recently built a friend has an 80 GB hdd and a 60 GB raid-0 array. Then he uses handy backup to freshen a backup folder. That way if it bites it, he just fixes whatever went wrong and copies everything back over to the raid. Also try to get em to backup finished stuff to CDRW but people must be lazy or something. ;)
It is more likely to die I suppose, but I've never really had any probs. As usual, there shoud be some way to back up as anything can happen raid or otherwise.
The prob I see is when you have a huge amount of tracks coming off the hdd. Most DAW apps I've messed with don't load the entire song into memory but "sip" off the hard drive as the buffers become low. This means that you could have all the memory in the world but your Cubase SX with 40 tracks might not use more than couple hundred MB of Memory at any given moment (haven't actually benchmarked but if you replay a tune you usually see the hdd light flickering the same way)...
 
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