Hard drive question for computer guru's

4

4-Man Takedown

New member
So I have a pretty old computer, a Dell Dimension T700r. It's been running audio very nicely with windows 98se. The main downfall is that my track count tops out at about 18-20 due to my hard drive speed I think...

So, first I got a firewire card and tried using my external 72,000rpm drive, with no avail, it seems the firewire isn't fast enough for some reason. I figure this is maybe because I'm useing firewire with windows 98se, but I have no idea.

So then I bought another internal 72,000rpm slave harddrive. First I tried installing it into my motherboard, but it didn't get noticed at all by the computer, so I put the 40 pin connector in the ATA card that's in my PCI slot, which my orginal harddrive was factory intsalled to also. It worked fine...

But I'm still only getting as many tracks as my original slow, loud harddrive. Am I doomed to a low track count? Or does anyone have any suggestions of how I could get the speed of the new drive to actually factor in.

I'm really bent on sticking with windows 98se since it's been so great so far.

Thanks
 
4-Man Takedown said:
So, first I got a firewire card and tried using my external 72,000rpm drive, with no avail,
Click to expand...

72,000rpm?? that hella fast!!!!! ;)

I'm just joshin' ya, it's actually a 7,200 RPM drive...which is plenty fast. Your problem is more of a CPU and RAM issue than a hard drive issue. You said you're running a Dell T700r?? That's got a 700MHz Pentium III on it right? I'd say that's your problem right there. You're overloading your CPU processing power. Does the recording program you use have a system monitor option where you can see how much CPU usage that you're doing? Try also doing a CTRL+ALT+DELETE (i think Win98 had this too) and look at your performance window and see where you're processing power is at. I'd bet you're maxing it out.
 
I don't think the hard drive is gonna give you much improvement over what you already have. One hard drive solution that might give you some improvement is to have your software applications running on one drive and your audio data files on a different drive, but with an older processor and Win 98 there is not much else you can do except increase your RAM. What is your processor speed and how much RAM have you got?

My old 700 MHz AMD Duron with 256M RAM would only do about the same as what you're getting when I used to run Sonar. When I upgraded to a 2.5GHz processor and 512M RAM my speed and track count increased dramatically (I haven't tried more than 40 tracks yet but it hasn't showed any signs of fatigue up to that level with a generous number of plugins running).

Good luck,
Darryl.....
 
I agree with these two gentlemen. It's not your hard drives that are holding you back...it's your CPU and memory. Looks like you may be in for more of an upgrade than you originally thought.
 
I've upgraded to 512mb Ram, which works pretty good. The thing is I'm running at super low CPU power, but the tracks are jumping because there were too many. I figured upgrading the harddrive should at least give me a few more tracks than my old slower hard drive.

I'm using tracktion by the way.
 
7,200rpm is the speed pretty much everyone here on the forum and a bunch of studios will be running their Hard drives at. the next size up is 10,000 which gets pretty expensive and too much for normal recording i think. now if you're going to get into post production and need to have 100+ tracks of sound effects at a time...yeah, then you might consider it. but i say the CPU is the weakest link in your chain right now.
however, the hard drive that came with it probably was an ATA 66...which is defintely slower (throughput wise) than todays ATA100s. Although I'm not sure your motherboard would support ATA100. Also, back to the processor, the Pentium IIIs had 133MHz FSB speed...definitely slow if you're wanting to run a bunch of tracks across it at the same time.
 
Yeah it's an ATA 66.

I suppose I am doomed to only having about 18 tracks total. Unfortunately I won't have the money for a new computer anytime soon.

Thanks a lot for the input.
 
4-Man Takedown said:
I've upgraded to 512mb Ram, which works pretty good. The thing is I'm running at super low CPU power, but the tracks are jumping because there were too many. I figured upgrading the harddrive should at least give me a few more tracks than my old slower hard drive.

I'm using tracktion by the way.
Click to expand...
You might think so, but the CPU is already so much of a bottleneck that a faster hard drive is not able to improve the track count. It's like putting Pirelli racing tires on a VW Beetle and expecting it to go faster. The tires aren't the problem, the weak engine is. You're going to have to upgrade the CPU before you'll see any improvement from faster hard drives.
 
Cram in the RAM, man. As soon as you hit the RAM limit, it starts using the HDD for extra room, and you're over.

I just went from 256 -> 1G in a 750MHz Duron with XP and it's a lot snappier.
 
Wait a second. Your IDE/ATA interface is through a PCI card?

Maximum PCI throughput is 33 mbps. There is your bottleneck, I believe. You can add all the RAM you want, you can upgrade your CPU, but if my math is correct, you're still limited by PCI throughput. ATA 66 is twice as fast as PCI throughput.

Another thought: Does your IDE cable have 80 wires, or 40? If it only has 40, the drive will not perform at capacity. The double wires, though they do not carry signal, allow ATA 100 and above (if my memory serves).
 
AGCurry said:
Maximum PCI throughput is 33 mbps. There is your bottleneck, I believe. You can add all the RAM you want, you can upgrade your CPU, but if my math is correct, you're still limited by PCI throughput. ATA 66 is twice as fast as PCI throughput.
Click to expand...
I think you're thinking of 33Mhz for the PCI bus. Either that or you're thinking of PCI v.1. PCI buses (nowadays) have a 4 byte bus width, giving a max throughput of 132MB/sec.
 
elevate said:
I think you're thinking of 33Mhz for the PCI bus. Either that or you're thinking of PCI v.1. PCI buses (nowadays) have a 4 byte bus width, giving a max throughput of 132MB/sec.
Click to expand...

yep
33-66MHz for the bus speed. 133MBps throughput
i'm tellin' ya...it's not the hard drive.
 
Not the harddrive. The bottleneck is in the RAM, cpu, bus speed area. Does the pc recognize you now have 512 MB of RAM? Not all pc's will recognize this by just adding it, and restarting. You may have to go into the BIOS and tell it you added some RAM. It may come down to the fact your pc has too slow FSB and just can't go any faster for what you are doing. Your only option, besides buying a new one, is to try and get the pc as clean as possible. Clean up the hard drive, shut down any unneccesary programs, that kind of stuff.

Hope this helps.
Ed
 
Go buy a Barebones system for around $200.00 with a faster motherboard and processor and gut your old computer and put everything in that one.
 
elevate said:
I think you're thinking of 33Mhz for the PCI bus. Either that or you're thinking of PCI v.1. PCI buses (nowadays) have a 4 byte bus width, giving a max throughput of 132MB/sec.
Click to expand...

I stand corrected.

However... PCI throughput IS an issue when you're pumping a lot of data to and from hard drives AND a sound card, both on the PCI bus. I found this out the hard way when I tried a PCI SCSI card in my recording rig.

I'm not disputing the consensus that the hard drive isn't the problem. I'd just be interested to see how the system performed with the hard drives working from the motherboards's IDE interface, rather than through the PCI bus.
 
deepwater said:
Go buy a Barebones system for around $200.00 with a faster motherboard and processor and gut your old computer and put everything in that one.
Click to expand...

If you can do this, probably the best way to spend some money. :o
 
AGCurry said:
I stand corrected.

However... PCI throughput IS an issue when you're pumping a lot of data to and from hard drives AND a sound card, both on the PCI bus. I found this out the hard way when I tried a PCI SCSI card in my recording rig.

I'm not disputing the consensus that the hard drive isn't the problem. I'd just be interested to see how the system performed with the hard drives working from the motherboards's IDE interface, rather than through the PCI bus.
Click to expand...

i don't know about that. PCI is pretty reliable for what I've been doing. at work I've got 2 firewire drives, a firewire CD-RW, a soundcard and a Digidesign Mix Core card all in PCI slots. Of course I'm not sending info to all those devices at the same time, however my PCI activitiy is at half the throughput that is capable during tracking or mixing....and never really goes beyond that. I'm betting your SCSI card is what slowed your hard drive throughput down back in the day. SCSI maxed out at 16bit, 80MBps...and that was only with Wide Ultra2. Taking into account the PCI bus throughput...i think you were limited by your SCSI througput capability, not your PCI's.
 
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