A Good Hard Drive

[bdemenil]

When people discuss DAWs, they typically put lots of emphasis on CPU speed. I've found that HD speed contributes at least as much to stability and performance as CPU. I recently began using 10K rpm Western Digital SATA drives for OS and recording, and the difference has been spectacular. I would never want to go back to 7200rpm ATA drives for anything other than archiving.

 

[Sklathill]

I personally am thinking 3 Samsung 5400 RPM drives in a RAID 5 array would give you the best combination of performance, quiet, and data integrity.

 

[Bulls Hit]

I recently began using 10K rpm Western Digital SATA drives for OS and recording, and the difference has been spectacular. I would never want to go back to 7200rpm ATA drives for anything other than archiving.

What you can run more plugins now, more tracks or what?

 

[bdemenil]

More tracks and greater stability. Much better latency. Now that I'm using an outboard reverb, and CPU speeds have improved so dramatically, nothing else I'm running realy uses too much CPU.

 

[wheelema]

Two drives in a RAID 0 array significantly kicks up throughput.

 

[bdemenil]

I've experimented with ATA raid, and haven't had the best results. I'm getting better performance from a single 10K SATA drive. Now, I'm sure if I put two of these in a SATA raid, it would be better yet, but raid 0 greatly increases the risk of data loss due to drive error or failure.

Another issue is that many people use PCI cards for raid. These cards share bandwidth with your soundcard (if you use a PCI interface). This can hurt performance too.

 

[Bulls Hit]

More tracks and greater stability. Much better latency. Now that I'm using an outboard reverb, and CPU speeds have improved so dramatically, nothing else I'm running realy uses too much CPU.

But if you're using outboard reverb now, that's not a legit comparison. How do you know the improvement in performance isn't down to the outboard unit instead of the hard drive?

 

[noiseportrait]

So how does SATA compare to IDE? I have two drives and two cd burners using up all of my IDE ports right now, and I'm planning on getting another bigger drive for audio soon. The problem is that I want to keep both of my old drives, but neither of them are SATA compatible. The new drive could be on the SATA pot, but I don't want to sacrifice speed on my biggest and fastest hard drive. Is SATA as fast as IDE? Are there any other compromises I would be making?

Could someone also explain RAID arrays? I'm pretty savy with most of this stuff but when it comes to hard drives I've always just plugged 'em into the first open IDE slot and forgotten about them.

 

[webstop]

Maybe SATA drive is technically faster then UATA. In real life, however, even modern UATA-100 drives are quite sufficient. The largest tracks count in one project I had so far was 31 stereo tracks, and Seagate Barracuda handled that without a hiccup. Therefore, in my case moving to a faster drive would not give me any practical performance improvement.

 

[bdemenil]

webstop, I doubt you're running at 96Khz, I don't think a regular 7200rpm UATA drive could handle 31 stereo tracks at that resolution. Before I switched to my new rig, I was maxing high 20s mono 24bit 96K tracks, and losing stability in the mid-teens. Now I'd feel confident going up to 40 or 50, and have achieved stable playback with as high as 70-80 tracks. SATA is a much better interface, and the drive I'm using, the 10K rpm WD, is a whole different animal from a standard 7200rpm UATA.

Quality and architecture of the motherboard is also important. I'm using an Opteron board by ASUS. In general, I think you'll get better performance from SATA and Raid if it's built into the motherboard than if you're using a controller card. A controller card shares PCI bandwidth and power with your soundcard (and whatever else you have plugged in there). Built in controllers usually are independent of the PCI bus.

 

[Hoodoo]

Could someone also explain RAID arrays? I'm pretty savy with most of this stuff but when it comes to hard drives I've always just plugged 'em into the first open IDE slot and forgotten about them.

Without getting too techie, a RAID array is simply a bunch of hard drives paired to together to offer redundancy or speed improvements for data storage and retrieval. They were originally used by servers to mirror data from one hard drive to another. If one hard drive failed, the mirrored 2nd drive would serve as backup. More often, you'd see 4, 8, 16 drives mirrored for data redundancy.

For today's consumer applications, RAID arrays offer a way to combine 2 or more smaller hard drives to act like one, faster, larger hard drive-- i.e. take two 80 Gb hard drives and create a RAID so that it becomes a faster 160 GB storage drive. Or, you can use it as explained previously-- one drive mirrors the other exactly so that if you lose one drive, another has automatically backed up the data.

In either case, I have found that RAID arrays only offer marginal improvements to performance, and that my backup process (manual to CD/DVD) is sufficient. Personally, I'd stay away from RAIDs and just buy the biggest, fastest hard drive you can budget.

 

[webstop]

webstop, I doubt you're running at 96Khz, I don't think a regular 7200rpm UATA drive could handle 31 stereo tracks at that resolution. Before I switched to my new rig, I was maxing high 20s mono 24bit 96K tracks, and losing stability in the mid-teens.

All my tracks are 24/88.2 and stereo. 31 tracks was maximum I ever used in a project. I never tried to max out my drive performance, and I don't know how much more then that it would handle. If you had problems running 20 mono tracks at 24/96, you must have had something wrong with the setup, or maybe buffers too small, or maybe drive too fragmented or something else. It has been discussed and proven many times at this board that 7200 rpm UATA100 8 mb buffer drives work just fine. If you like to go for the best (and more expensive) that is your choice, but for basic stable performance it is not necessary.

 

[webstop]

In general, I think you'll get better performance from SATA and Raid if it's built into the motherboard than if you're using a controller card. A controller card shares PCI bandwidth and power with your soundcard (and whatever else you have plugged in there). Built in controllers usually are independent of the PCI bus.

Maybe I am wrong, but I thought that integrated controllers use the same PCI bus, except that they interface with it directly.

 

[Roger Mac]

For today's consumer applications, RAID arrays offer a way to combine 2 or more smaller hard drives to act like one, faster, larger hard drive-- i.e. take two 80 Gb hard drives and create a RAID so that it becomes a faster 160 GB storage drive. Or, you can use it as explained previously-- one drive mirrors the other exactly so that if you lose one drive, another has automatically backed up the data.

In either case, I have found that RAID arrays only offer marginal improvements to performance, and that my backup process (manual to CD/DVD) is sufficient. Personally, I'd stay away from RAIDs and just buy the biggest, fastest hard drive you can budget.

Just to add a little to this...
The speed increase in Raid format is because of the following (assume two disks):
- the "system" can assign a chuck of data to be written to drive "A"
- while drive "A" is writing that data, the system can assign the next chunk of data to be written to drive "B".

Since the time-to-write-the-data-to-disk is the limiting factor, you divide that action over multiple disks. The net effect is that the write times overlap. Before drive "A" finishes writing, drive "B" is starting it's chunk. You end up with each file spread over two disks but the read and write times have increased because both drives can/might be reading (or writing) at the same time.

The next issue is mirroring. Since every file is spread over multiple disks, if you lose one disk you have lost half of each of your files. In that case the file(s) are useless. The only solution is replace the problem disk and restore your last backup/saved version. (What? No backups?)

There are several Raid setups: Raid, Raid plus mirror, straight Mirroring.

Oh, it's usless to take two drives and go Raid plus mirror. As explained in another post, a mirrored disk is a copy of the data from one disk that is stored on another disk - if one disk fails you still have the copy and the system will automatically go to it if needed. But with two disks you are overloading the system. You are writing chucks to drive 'A' and copying "A" to drive "B" plus writing the alternating chunks to Drive "B" and copying those chucks to drive "A". (yikes). Net result is writing the file to both disks.

One last thought, if you do go any flavor of Raid it's is HIGHLY recommended to use disks of the same speed and size. The slowest disk will determine your overall speed. And you don't want the larger disk to be writing to the 41GB position when you paired it with an 40GB disk.

Um... I hope that made sense.
Roger

 

[ColdAsh]

What track count can 7200 RPM give you?

Just woundering how many mono 24k 44.1khz track you can get out of a goot ATA 7200RPM hard drive (audio only hard drive ofcourse)
Havent had to play with more than a few track at a time but after my next upgrade i'll be doing largish mixes.
Cheers

 

[bdemenil]

All my tracks are 24/88.2 and stereo. 31 tracks was maximum I ever used in a project.

Are these simultaneous tracks? Track limitations show up in recording before playback. This because of the stress of reading and writing to the drive simultaneously. At the kind of data rates you're talking about, I was experiencing track-offset issues with WDM, and dropouts with ASIO. The recording software does seem to make a difference, with ntrack being able to handle fewer tracks than cubase.

It might be different with different soundcards too. I experimented with HD192 and Delta1010. It could be that a 2 input soundcard allows for a higher track count.

I've worked on a number of different setups, and found the results pretty consistent. The drive always reaches its limit long before its theoretical maximum throughput is reached. Again, maybe this is because it is reading and writing simultaneously. Also, I've only tested at 24/96, it could be that at 88.2, performance is improved because less data is being written.

 

[bdemenil]

Maybe I am wrong, but I thought that integrated controllers use the same PCI bus, except that they interface with it directly.

I'm not a hardware expert, but on many of the newer and better motherboards, integrated SATA controllers, at least, bypass the PCI bus. And on almost any motherboard, I believe the PCI bus is powered independently. This can be an issue, as some soundcards are power hungry.

 

[ColdAsh]

Im mainly concerned with playback. As im using a m audio omni studio i cant record too many tracks at once anyway. So playback with a couple of track recording (drums will be via BFD). Could anybody give me any ideas. 32 is what i'll be aiming for. I might get a SATA hard drive it it'll make a big difference

 

[bdemenil]

at 24/44.1, you shouldn't have any problem doing 30 tracks on a regular 7200 rpm drive - as long as you're using separate drives for recording and for the os. It also helps to have the recording drive on its own ribbon.

As long as you're recording audio, it's not just playback anymore.

 

[noiseportrait]

Thanks for answering my question about RAID arrays. Makes total sense now.

But I'm still very curious about the performance and trade offs of IDE vs. SATA, because I'm going to be making a new hard drive purchase in the next few days and I'm a little confused about my options. If anyone could help out it would be greatly appreciated.