Two hard drives or three???

G

G. Simon

New member
I've heard a number of people tout the greatness of having three hard drives for their pc-based home studio. I think the typical setup looks something like:

c: drive (40-80GB) for the OS
d: drive (40-80GB) for streaming audio
e: drive (120-300GB) for data and storage

Which drive would get the recording software application? (or any other pc apps which may not have anything to do with recording) Or maybe three hard drives is overkill and two drives are actually enough?

What capacities, speeds, and other parameters should I be paying attention to when planning out the hard drive configuration of my new (windows) pc?

Recommendations, please?


Thanks,
Glenn
 
I have 2 drives:

The system drive - I install all programs here, including the OS and applications.

The data drive - This is where all of my Sonar projects and their audio data lives. If I had unlimited resources, I would add a third drive, and set it up in a RAID array with the this one, which may be what other people are doing with a third drive. If you're unfamiliar, RAID basically backs everything up automatically all the time, so if one of your data hard drives dies, no big deal - all the data's on the other one too. Of course, this only protects against dead drives - fire and flood will still kill your data, so I backup on a removable harddrive that I keep at my workplace.
 
I have a sata main and a sata slave HD. When I first rigged up my Presonus Firebox (a firewire device), I had all sorts of problems and crashes trying to record audio files direct to my sata slave drive. Seems there were major conflicts for lots of users with the following...sata slave drives, firewire ports and Windows SP2. The 3 things weren't communicating very well at all.

There was some drama with the firewire port not being allowed to accept enough data due to some error in SP2. Patches were released by microsoft; advice around the traps was to update firmware for the firewire ports among other things.

Anyway, once I basically fixed things up, I bought a 160g HD to use as main drive, hung on to my already existing 80g slave sata drive and abandoned plans to attempt recording live audio data onto the slave drive. So, now I record all audio to the main and I have all apps and the OS on there too. It's so large that I figure not much can go wrong as far as crowding/ competing for resources. Now I use the 80g slave to eventually transfer completed songs and their related audio files.

I've been running like that for half a year...though I've checked to see if the main HD needs a defrag, it never does, and everything else is smooth.

In a nut shell, I don't see too much wrong with recording to the main HD
 
Howdy
Well since 1978 I have been building and using computers. My current recording computer does only that record. It does music, video, and slide shows. It outputs to CD and DVD. Inside it has a gig of memory 2x 80 gig raid drives, and 2x 250gig D: & E: drives. The 2 raid drives are used in tandem as esentially 1 C: in other words one mirrors the other. This is where all of the opperating system and it's components live and the paging file. The D: drive is where all of the capturing and rendering is done for both music and video. The E: drive is where the finished projects all live until they get archived. I use 3 160 gig usb2 external drives for archiving projects. and it is a good thing to do this because I have had customers come back and buy fresh copies of the material they had me produce for them, After they had it ruined.

I hope this helps with you set up

Griz
 
Griz knows exactly what he's doing.

I have powerbook with an internal drive in 2 partitions. I know, I know- this DECREASES performance, but it lets me defrag the data partition without having to boot off a different disk. Any projects that I need to have mobile live on the 2nd partition while the OS and all apps live on the first.

I have a couple firewire swappable drive bays and a small army of drives that spend time in them. I have 1 160g, 3 80g, a couple 60g, and 3 9g drives. Its much cheaper to buy ONE firewire enclosure and keep popping different drives in them- drives are cheap and there's no need to pay for lots of firewire electronics at the same time.

Anyway, the idea is to have one main drive for works in progress and another drive that its regularly backed up to. Then I have another drive for archiving completed projects. In this case its the 160 gig drive and only parts of it are backed up to other drives. The I use the smaller drives for quick and dirty backups of projects I'm working on or to take a project to a different studio- no use subjecting the larger drives to the extra jolts and shocks of travelling.

As if that weren't enough, I also back completed projects up to DVD. I've had a couple 80g drives (all maxtors...) crash and never come back. Between data recovery and good backup habits I've never lost any work. My first close call (4 years of work on 1 drive...) was enough and I take *no* chances now if I can help it.

Take care,
Chris
 
Most of the time people think they have loads of drives, when in actual fact, they only have one, but it's split into partitions.
On the question "two hard drives of three", you only need one, in my opinion. One large capacity drive of say 160Gb is cheaper than two 80Gb ones...so the obvious solution is to buy a 160gb and split it up into two partitions.
Three drives is certainly unecessary, unless you are doing applications that require a lot of space...but recording probably isn't one of these. I was more thinking of Video editing.
Myself, I don't see the need for a large capacity hard drive for my needs, so I got a Mini Mac with 80Gb. That's fine for me. And if I need to expand, I'll buy a firewire drive.
 
Sorry, panoramical, but I have to disagree. Splitting one drive into partitions achieves neither of the advantages of multiple drives that I'm interested in:

Multiple drives means you can have OS/application and data I/O going on simultaneously.

If one drive fails, you have less recovery work to do. As it is, I copy an image of my data drive for backup purposes. If my system drive goes out, I'll just reinstall a few apps - I'd probably be better off, too, after all the crap that's been on that drive over time ;). In any case, no need to backup the main drive - reinstallation is just as easy.

Also, video editing may put audio to shame in terms of being a space hog, but I fill about 1% a week of my 160 gig data drive - I'm at 49% right now. My system drive (40 gig -its gettin' old) is about 75% full. And, I record at 44.1/24. I assume that those recording at 96/24 and 192/24 are taking up space 2x and 4x more quickly, respectively. In any case, a 99% full drive isn't as efficient as a 50% full drive. Space is good, and necessary.

Sorry if it seems like I'm out to get you, panoramical - I'm really not - just disagree on this one.
 
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