Hard Disk Too Slow?

E

EZWriter

New member
So. I figured out my latency issues by using the metronome. Even managed to add a drum track. Now I have a new issue.... I know. It's endless.

I started a new project and recorded one stereo track of vocal and guitar. No issue. Then halfway through adding a mono track of 1 background vocal the VST performance monitor went ballistic on the lower reading and I started getting distortion to the point of barely being able to hear anything. According to the manual this means the hard drive is not supplying information fast enough and I need a faster hard drive. BUT I didn't have this issue when I STARTED recording earlier this week and managed to lay down 5 or 6 tracks without distortion... Why is this happening all of a sudden and could I solve this by reinstalling Cubase to a faster external harddrive or would this only create more problems? Or, alternatively is there an easier fix I'm missing?
 
perhaps there's two different issues here... the speed of the disc that you're writting to... and whether you have a disc dedicated to just that... in other words you want the prog on a systen disc... and recording to a second disc dedicated to being recorded to... if you check around the general population here you'll find some even hace a third disc dedicated to reproducing vsti's... as for speed 7200 is the minimum with a large cache is preferable... all 3 of mine have 32meg...
 
dementedchord said:
perhaps there's two different issues here... the speed of the disc that you're writting to... and whether you have a disc dedicated to just that... in other words you want the prog on a systen disc... and recording to a second disc dedicated to being recorded to... if you check around the general population here you'll find some even hace a third disc dedicated to reproducing vsti's... as for speed 7200 is the minimum with a large cache is preferable... all 3 of mine have 32meg...
Click to expand...

Hmmm. I am recording to an external harddrive that is nearly new so I'll have to go research its specs. That said I think I found one of the problems. I turned on my resource monitor under task manager and Cubase was barely tweaking the CPU. When I recorded a stereo track it was using less than 15% and hardly making the harddrive pant. THEN as soon as I went to VST instruments and opened my demo of Addictive Drummer things went to crap. I immediately uninstalled AD but it was getting late. I'm going to try recording without it today and I'll keep you posted.
 
EZWriter said:
Hmmm. I am recording to an external harddrive that is nearly new so I'll have to go research its specs.
Click to expand...
An external hard drive? What kind of bus? (FireWire, USB, etc?) The kind of bus you use, as well as other devices on that bus, can be a bottleneck. When thinking of sustained drive speed, you need to always have 3 things in mind:

- RPMs (faster is better)
- Drive size (bigger drives move more data per rotation)
- Bus (internal SATA is standard for modern PCs/notebooks and is just fine. older internal buses, IDE/PATA and external buses like firewire and usb, can all pose bottlenecks that render the core speed of your drive meaningless)
 
Ideally, you would want two internal hard drives; one for your o/s and DAW app, and the other strictly for your streaming audio data. This way there would be no conflicts or interruptions for os housekeeping chores or timesharing of the drive's read/write heads.

An external hard drive can work if you're connected through a firewire port, but you probably don't want to run your samples and plugs through the external drive. A USB drive probably won't work at all.


Here's a good article for optimizing your Win XP and Vista computer. The Vista article would probably work for Win7.

XP
http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ts/detail.php?Index=30058&Keyword=pc+optimizationfalse

Vista
http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/ts/detail.php?Index=31969&Keyword=pc+optimizationfalse
 
If your only recording 1-2 tracks at a time I would think that even a 5400 rpm drive would work fine, but of course I could be wrong.

And as a side note, I've recorded 8 tracks to an external USB drive using Cubase on a Pentium 4 Dell machine. However, I wouldn't recommend it. I did it out of necessity:eek:.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top