5.1 mixing

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bluesjamr

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I am building a computer for the specific purpose of running Pro Tools 11 HD to mix in 5.1 surround. I'm kind of new at this whole computer business, but I have been getting a serious education in a hurry. What I want to do (I think) is run Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on a solid state drive, while using 2 hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration for processing. Has anyone else out there tried to do this?
 
That's the easy part. Make sure it's a fast RAID (something attached to the gigabit) and your off to the races.
 
As Massive said, that's the easy part but you seem to be off a good start. Your audio processing disks should be separate from your DAW as AE is a disk-intensive process that can wreak havoc on a single-disk system.
 
If you look closely at RAID 0, for large data chunks, it is really a waste of time and effort. Audio is considered large data chunks. Where you gain using raid is in hosting databases that do transactional based "calls". Small bits of read/write to commit to the database. In addition, we are talking about 100's to 1000's of these read/write transaction per mS. Even if this increased your speed (large chunks of data it wouldn't), it would be so nominal that you probably wouldn't even notice it. RAID 0 was really to improve Disk I/O which is the slowest part of your computer system.

Since RAID 0 has no redundancy, if one disk goes down, you loose data on both disks. This therefore increases you probability of disk failure (X2 since you have two disks) and increases your chance of data loss.

I would not do a RAID 0, but either do a mirror schema (I wouldn't do that either), I would use the second disk for routine backups. Much safer and better use of your hard drives and it is built in to Win7.

Hope I helped a little.
 
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