200 gig SATA reading as 127gig capacity

[johntheson]

Bulls Hit "hit" the nail on the head. In Windows XP the FAT file system will only recognise drive up to a certain size. I think it might be 127gb(I'm not sure right off hand). NTFS has no such limitations. Did you fset the drive up with the FAT system or the NTFS system? If you are not using the NTFS system now, and don't need the extra space until you feel like formatting your drive again for a clean system; just use the FAT now, and set up for NTFS next time. My .02 worth.
John Sr.

 

[RawDepth]

I don't like the idea of having disk traffic clogging the pci bus in a DAW.

Nah, that won't be a problem.

In a PC, the standard PCI bus operates at 33MHz. This means that data can be transferred through the bus at a maximum rate of 133MB/s. (Megabytes per second)

While recording one track, if your bit rate is 16 and sample rate is 44.1, the hard drive must write approximately 5 Megabytes per minute. Dividing that by 60 seconds means the drive must write 0.083333MB per second in order to keep up. Not a problem for the PCI bus. Even if you recorded 32 simultaneous tracks, it would require 2.6MB/s.

Next if you increased the bit depth to 32 and the sample rate to 192, the bus would see a total traffic load of 23.4 Megabytes in one second. That is less than one fifth of the buss’s capacity.

Let us say that we have a PCI soundcard and a PCI drive controller installed. We are still only stressing the bus to less than half of its ability. That should be a stroll in the park for most motherboards. What’s the problem?

 

[crankz1]

..... Let us say that we have a PCI soundcard and a PCI drive controller installed. We are still only stressing the bus to less than half of its ability. That should be a stroll in the park for most motherboards. What’s the problem?

Give it a try, run a PCI drive controller and a PCI audio interface. Use that PCI controller for your audio drive. Then come back and tell us all that it didn't create a problem.
Fact is .... it's caused problems for many people already.
Sure, the math all works out and it looks good on paper ..... check it out in the real world. That's where it counts.

Not a flame by any means, it's just that PCI latency and bandwidth are of extreme concerns when dealing with computer based DAW's.

 

[Bulls Hit]

Nah, that won't be a problem.


Let us say that we have a PCI soundcard and a PCI drive controller installed. We are still only stressing the bus to less than half of its ability. That should be a stroll in the park for most motherboards. What’s the problem?

Bandwidth is not the only constraint. Like Crankz1 says, latency is the problem. If the HD controller holds onto the pci bus while your soundcard is waiting to use it, you'll get a drop out. Same thing happens with latency on AGP video cards, they hold up the pci bus, recording turns to custard.

Latency issues are real hard to track down too, better off avoiding them in the first place

 

[RawDepth]

If the HD controller holds onto the pci bus while your soundcard is waiting to use it, you'll get a drop out.

Well, I never considered that the PCI bus can only serve one device at a time. Perhaps latency would become a problem. Unless, of course, he happens to have a USB or Firewire audio interface. Then it might work.

Oh well! I'll admit when I am wrong and sit down and shut up. I didn't mean to hijack your thread Bittch Beeter. I just thought I was on to something there.

Good luck with it.

 

[Bittch Beeter]

ended up searching my hardware...finding the disk, and the remaining portion was unused...


...it was really simple, just highlight it decide how much I wanted in the partition, and format...bam

 

[sonusman]

Nah, that won't be a problem.

In a PC, the standard PCI bus operates at 33MHz. This means that data can be transferred through the bus at a maximum rate of 133MB/s. (Megabytes per second)

While recording one track, if your bit rate is 16 and sample rate is 44.1, the hard drive must write approximately 5 Megabytes per minute. Dividing that by 60 seconds means the drive must write 0.083333MB per second in order to keep up. Not a problem for the PCI bus. Even if you recorded 32 simultaneous tracks, it would require 2.6MB/s.

Next if you increased the bit depth to 32 and the sample rate to 192, the bus would see a total traffic load of 23.4 Megabytes in one second. That is less than one fifth of the buss’s capacity.

Let us say that we have a PCI soundcard and a PCI drive controller installed. We are still only stressing the bus to less than half of its ability. That should be a stroll in the park for most motherboards. What’s the problem?

You gotta also consider that when you see transfer rates, those usually NOT sustained transfer rates, rather, burst transfer rates. Sustained transfer rates are typically 1/3 what the burst transfer rate is in computers. I am not sure if the PCI bus suffers from this like HDD's and HDD controllers do, but it is worth considering.

PCI latency is actually becoming easier to fix. I use a little app called PowerStrip . It will allow you to adjust the time a pci card can tie up the pci bus. The trick is, not all devices allow this to be adjusted! Usually, devices like HDD controllers and AGP cards will allow it. But, some soundcards won't. Some USB and Firewire cards won't.

As I recall, for XP to use BIG HHD's, you need SP1 installed, and you of course need to be using NTFS.