A Question of Hard Drive Arrays

J

Julia

New member
Good morning, Friends.

I was wondering if someone could explain to me the optimal set-up for two hard drives.

I keep reading on this board and elsewhere that it is essential when building a DAW (which I am currently doing) to have two hard drives...one for OS and applications, and the other simply for the music data.

I don't understand quite how that works, and I'd like to know how to set them up on the motherboard in particular. One as master and the second as slave simply? Or is it preferable to use a RAID 0 array? (I am using a RAID capable board, the NF7-S by Abit.)

Also, with two drives, how do the OS and applications on one drive read and interact with the data on the second drive?

Thank you very much.

Julia
 
you want to ATA133 drives minimum 7200rpm. I have a 40 gig for my O/S and an 80gig for my audio recordings.

The way I done mine was, the 40 gig drive I partitioned ito two, C and D and the 80 gig drive I formated as E. Set up the first drive as primary master and the second as secondary master.

I put my O/S on the C partition, my multitrack software on the D partition and when I record I tell my multitrack software to record to a designated folder on the 80 gig E drive. if you have a CDRW or a DVDR just hook them up as slaves.

I'm running Cubase on a Gigabyte GA7VE+ board, AMD 1800XP, 512 DDR PC2100 memory and Win98se. I've had 28 audio tracks at 24/48 running laden with plugins and my CPU performance bar never peaks over 70%

Invest in a quiet PSU and quiet fan. The seagate hard drives are good. look for the ones with the 8MB cache

Good luck building your DAW.

Alec.
 
I asked the same ques. many a time and that seems to be standard,that's what I'll do too.

You also may want to consider an extra partition as a swap file/picture cache. Keeping the pci bus free of other devices is important, so I've given up on raid as I have the same mobo for daw. You can also utilize the sata controllers for cd rom and keep everything off ide. Putting cd rom there won't be an issue as it wont be used during recording thus not taking from pci throughput. I don't believe ide routes through the pci bus but your audio card will, keep them bare if able. Ghosting as suggestedby someone else to me seems to be a consideration also.

7200/8mb/ata133 x2 on seperate ide cables both master

cd roms on sata controller(press f6 to load 3rd party driver)

That's a great board by the way.
 
Thank you...

Thank you both very much for your helpful responses.

I must say that I do not know how to partition a hard drive, so it is something I will need to learn. I have no idea how or where it is done. I do thank you very much for the details, and I will attempt to learn how to do this.

I also don't know what "ghosting" means.

But...my motherboard as you know supports SATA, so bullyhill, should I figure out how to set my CD burner up with the SATA controller? That is a better set-up for a DAW in general?

Alec, thank you for the very detailed description of the partitioning of your hard drives. I will try to figure out what all of that means, and how to partition. I realize that these are things I need to know.

All the rest of my components arrived today...I hope to start building my DAW tomorrow.

Let's see...

Antec's SLK3700AMB

Abit NF7-S

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton

512mb DDR400 (PC3200) at the moment...I may trade that for 1G of DDR333 since my processor limits the useage anyway, and double that 512mb DDR400 for another system I want to build next for video editing.

Lite-On CD burner

Standard (Samsung, I think) floppy drive

Maxtor 80GB 8m/ATA133/7200rpm, (and I need to buy another of these soon)

keyboard, mouse, etc...and I got an anti-static wrist strap, too!

Can you tell I'm a novice yet?

Thank you again for your input. Much appreciated.

Julia
 
best way to partition a drive is in DOS mode. Boot to dos and type FDISK. you can partition from there. I'd do a web search for FDISK or partitioning and read up first.

when you partition a hard drive your operating system sees the partitioned part as a seperate drive.

Hope this helps Julia.
 
THanks, lemontree...

I'll Google myself a search for partitioning from DOS. Thanks for the thoughts.

Julia
 
LemonTree said:
best way to partition a drive is in DOS mode. Boot to dos and type FDISK.
Click to expand...

Not really. FDISK is the least flexible partitioning tool in existence.

I would forget about all this, and just use the tools available when you install the operating system.

Besides, there is a big difference between partitioning a drive and actually having a second spindle.
 
LemonTree said:
best way to partition a drive is in DOS mode. Boot to dos and type FDISK. you can partition from there. I'd do a web search for FDISK or partitioning and read up first.

when you partition a hard drive your operating system sees the partitioned part as a seperate drive.

Hope this helps Julia.
Click to expand...

Maybe if you're running Win98SE (which I hope she's not). 2000 and XP have partitioning tools built right in. Using FDISK can seriously screw things up, especially if you're going to run NTFS. I found that out the hard way a few years ago.
 
partitioning

Thanks, Gentlemen.

I read late into the night about all of this stuff, and realized later that XP takes care of this sort of matter. I will be installing Windows XP Professional and will rely on that for the setting up of my hard drive(s).

I did also recognize within my reading last night that Marquis' point about this not being anything like having a separate spindle is really on-target.

Thanks, friends.

Julia
 
Nice system!

Use xp to partition. Today I'm being tortured with 2 old systems and a award bios recovery. I'm dealing with dos and making boot disks way too much and it is so ..... forget it. Xp is easy just have all your drives in and keep that sata floppy on hand. IMHO you should load that floppy every time you load xp. You'll get to the screen for partitioning. Create all the partitions you'll need now on all the hard drives, no sense in doing it again or using some utility later.

Keep that memory in Q404 AMD will be letting 3800+ barton out with a 400mhz fsb so you should see a drop in the 3200+ and then you can upgrade the cpu. Good buy getting the 2500+ best bang for the buck.
Although:
That barton core will run in sync at 400mhz, on that board 1/1 ratio by dropping the multiplier from 11 to 9 and fsb to 200 , not adding volts and only using standard air cooling. Or just increase the multiplier to 13 @ 2.21g's Just Kidding:D No kidding I have a sickness. I overclocked my sailboat with a high performance rudder and dropping weight from my ballast to break hull speed.


Yes the modo supports two sata devices but you only got 1 controller which supports cdrom use. That's fine. This will free your pci bus as the cdrom will not be active when recording.

Ghosting is a program that creates an image of a hard drive or a partition. It creates a separate file that is an exact image of the drive. This copy can then be extracted to another hard drive or partition, it doesn't have to be the same size and can then be stored on cd or dvd or a seperate partition. You can ghost your OS partition when you have all your programs running smoothly. It's a back up. I don't know if ghosting everything will be worth the effort as compared to cd back up. I do like ghosting my bootable partitions I have 1 machine with a quad boot ghosted because it's a pain to optimize a partition for a specific use and then try and remember the setup details 6 months later. If you are going standard setup at first I wouldn't worry about it just create a small 5gb partition for future use.

What OS are you running on your current PC. Are you buying XP pro. If you already own XP buy the same ver(home/pro) in an oem ver from newegg for under a hundred bucks. I'll buy 1 also if we get someone else we get an even better discount for buying three...:)

Oh yeah, What mem did you buy? Corsair,kingston...?

Good luck all looks good and you seem to have a great outlook.
 
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