Dedicated hard drives?

[R_Spaulding]

Would it be a bad idea to store the sound libraries for 3 different MIDI programs onto the same physical hard drive (not the system drive)? In other words, have one hard drive for all 3 programs sound libraries separate from the system drive?

Or should I have separate drives for each program? Or separate partitions on the same physical drive even?

 

[Steenamaroo]

I can't imagine it's going to matter,,,but they way to find out is to do it..

Use all three programs at once and monitor your HDD usage under your daw, or operating system... if you're not running into problems, then it's all good


Using different partitions won't make a difference AKAIK, cos ultimately you're still accessing the same disk.


I run all of my sound libraries out of the system drive, and have never hit a problem yet......i do however keep my recorded audio on a separate drive.

I think keeping them on the system drive would lead to problems..

 

[suprstar]

Are you talking about vsti's like ezdrummer etc? Those samples get loaded when you load the project, it's not reading the disk while you're recording/mixing. I can't imagine other vsti's do anything different, so I'm gonna vote 'no', I dont think it matters.

I recorded 12 or 14 tracks at a time in cubase, on a 4200rpm laptop hard drive, that had everything including the OS on it, without problems. I think modern drives are fast enough to not be the bottleneck in any practical application.

That said, ideally I'd have the OS on a separate drive, cuz who the hell knows all the disk access resource wasting bloatware XP/vista processes use...

 

[TimOBrien]

Partitioning is a bad idea because the read/write arm has to lift up from one part of the disk
and move allllllll the way over to another part of the disk, set down, do its work and then go back again.

Add that up multiple times and mechanical movement is GLACIAL in terms of computer-time.
You want the data to be as contiguous as possible.


You don't need multiple sample library drives unless you are using HUNDREDS of sample tracks
(film and orchestral composers have to watch out for this sort of thing but not 99% of the rest of us....)
A standard 7200rpm drive will keep up just fine....

 

[R_Spaulding]

So would the following setup be considered more or less optimized?

System Drive: OS, all installed apps, etc.
Audio/Midi Projects Drive: all audio recording projects, midi libraries, etc.
Backup Drive: all important work files backed up

I also do a lot of video editing, would it be ideal to have a dedicated drive to work off of for video? Or could I run video projects off the same audio projects drive?

 

[suprstar]

So would the following setup be considered more or less optimized?

System Drive: OS, all installed apps, etc.
Audio/Midi Projects Drive: all audio recording projects, midi libraries, etc.
Backup Drive: all important work files backed up

I also do a lot of video editing, would it be ideal to have a dedicated drive to work off of for video? Or could I run video projects off the same audio projects drive?

That's pretty much exactly how my daw is set up drive-wise. Sounds perfect to me. You won't have any problems running video and audio projects on the same drive. Well, MAYBE if you're doing both video and audio simultaneously, that might use a lot of disk i/o, idk much about video....

 

[TimOBrien]

So would the following setup be considered more or less optimized?

System Drive: OS, all installed apps, etc.
Audio/Midi Projects Drive: all audio recording projects, midi libraries, etc.
Backup Drive: all important work files backed up

I also do a lot of video editing, would it be ideal to have a dedicated drive to work off of for video? Or could I run video projects off the same audio projects drive?

Doesn't matter where your video projects are; computers dont care about what you have on them, just what's being accessed at the SAME time.

Boot drive (C): OS, apps and VSTs/plugins
Second drive (D): Sample libraries and misc. data.
Third drive (E-Z): Music projects and misc. data.

I use a Glyph firewire drive daisy-chained to my Motu828mkII for an audio projects drive.
My Sample Library drive is a USB2 WD 1Tb drive and I >also< use it as a video editing drive.
I use another USB2 drive as a backup drive, but when its not actively backing up it goes in a firesafe
(a backup wont save you from fire, theft, disaster or lightning strike if its sitting there CONNECTED to your PC all the time...)

ZERO problems....