Ideal hard drive size???

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drumsagogo

New member
I'm buying a new Dell and am a little confused about what size hard drive to get.

One of their current specials is a free upgrade from 20gb 5400, to your choice of 40gb or 80gb 7200 drive. I don't know who makes it. At first, I thought I'd obviously go with the 80gb, but then I checked the specs and it is slightly slower than the 40gb.

......................80 / 40

ave seek time 9.5 / 8.9

spindle start time 10 / 5.5

latency 5.5 / 4.2

Could these numbers impact performance? Or is this splitting hairs. I doubt I'd ever have more than 30 tracks at 24/96 (I realize 2 drives are ideal, but I'm going to make sure I like how things sound first so it'll be one to start)
 
Well, it's hard to say...in fact we can't say *for sure*.

However, you're right. For most reasonable activities it shouldn't matter. That 9.5ms number is pretty high though...almost as high as some of the better 5400RPM drives. Thirty-two tracks of 24/96 requires only about 9Mb/s sustained transfer, which a very good 5400RPM drive is capable of...but jumping to 7200RPM really pushes it over the top and makes for smooth sailing.

I guess look at it this way: a new 40GB Maxtor 7200RPM drive with a liquid bearing (quiet) runs at like $70, and you can do a whole lot of audio work with a 40GB drive. Since you are buying from Dell and can never be sure what drives they're talking about, my *gut* tells me to go with the 40GB 7200RPM drive, only because it might be more reliable. Really, hard drive speed hasn't been a major factor in recording since the 7200RPM drive became the norm...so either would work....go with your own gut!

Also, I should note that when you realize just how taxing 24/96 recording is for a minimal gain (in a home studio environment anyhow), you might consider recording at 24/44.1 or 24/48. Not only will this improve performance dramatically, but it reduces the strain on the hard drive considerably.

Slackmaster 2000
 
>Infinite. If anything is stored, nothing is lost

Actually, while I like my 80GB drive better than my 40GB drive:

The bigger your drive, the more you can lose, AND

The bigger the drive, the bigger the job of backup becomes.
 
Get the bigger drive. Trust me. You WILL use and need the space.

I just installed a 120 gig drive in the system I'm on now, along with a 40 that I use only for writing backups to. I've got 75 gigs on it and it doesn't even hold most of my music data. the machine that does that has 40 and 80 gig drives and is stuffed full.
 
When it came down to it in a flip of the coin decision I went with the larger drive.

This is a pretty elementry question, but if I buy a second drive, I also need to buy an ATA (or ultra ATA) controller card...right? And this would take up one of my PCI slots?
 
No. Your Dell will come with a standard controller that will either be ATA/66 or ATA/100.

I might've gone for the 80GB drive myself, actually. Tough call!

Slackmaster 2000
 
Slackmaster2K said:
a new 40GB Maxtor 7200RPM drive with a liquid bearing (quiet)
Click to expand...

this is slightly off topic, but I built a friend of mine a system and put one of those 40gig maxtor quiet drives in with the liquid bearing (thinking, hey this drive should be quiet)... well no it is not... I have a Western Digital 40gb in my machine and the quietdrive is louder than my WD, and in my folks machine I built them I put a regular maxtor 40gb and it is more quiet than the maxtor quietdrive...
 
At the moment, I think any current drive is fast enough and big enough (unless you want to do video editing) for multitrack audio.
The downside to buying a ready to go pc is that it's unlikely that the hard drive will be partitioned. Faced with just one drive (say 60gig) I would split it into three equal "virtual" drives. The first for Windows and programs, the second for Audio files, the third for general files. Better yet is 2 drives, the second just for audio. Ask if you can have 2 of the smallest drive instead!
A program like Partition Magic can create new partitions on an existing system. Splitting drives into partitions might save you from disaster if an idiot or virus wipes the main C: partition and it makes defragmenting quicker and less likely to be a problem in the first place.
 
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