Building a New PC!

S

ShaneSelby

New member
Hello all!

I am getting ready to build a PC for audio. I have been doing some research and here is what I have decided on. Please take a look and tell me if you see any problems with this design or anything I am missing or should consider.

Asus P4PE/L Motherboard
P4 2.4B GHZ Northwood Processor
512MB Kingston HyperX PC2700 DDR333 Memory
WD 80GB JB Series Hard Drive (audio)
WD 40GB JB Series Hard Drive (OS)
Lite-On 52x24x52CDRW
Lite-On 52x CD-Rom
Matrox G450 Dual Head Video Card
Samsung Floppy Drive
Maxtop 350W Mid-Tower Case
Windows XP Pro

What is the best way to configure the CD Drives and the Hard Drives? I figured I would put the HD's on one IDE 1 and the CD's on IDE 2.

Another question. I have never installed 2 hard drives in a system at once. How to I go about selecting, upon set-up, which drive I am working with. I thought it might make sense to just install the OS drive first and get the system up and running and then install the audio drive. What is the standard for this?

Thanks in advance for you help!

Shane
 
The best way to set up the devices as far as ide channels go is to have each harddrive as on different ide channels. The reason for this is that the computer can only access one device on each ide channel simultaneously. So if your runnning a program off of one drive which needs audio from another, you want the system to have simultaneous access to both drives.

As far as selecting which drive to use, i think you mean when installing windows, right? Well if so, i dont remember exactly how you do it, but its very obvious and simple step once you get into the setup if i remember correctly. I also suggest that you take advantage of the step of the installation that allows you to partition that hardrives. Cut your audio drive into a 15 or 20 gig workspace and a 60 or 65 gig storage area. This will save you in defragmenting times and allow you to archive simply by saving a finished project as a bundle in the storage area and then eliminating it from the workspace area. Some people like to make a 2 gb partition or just big enough for windows and its components on their software drive, and maybe another 2 gb partition for the page file and even another solely for audio programs. You could get pretty crazy with partitions, the only one i really suggest is the splitting of the audio drive into those two main sections.

Eric
 
Thanks KingstonRock.

I would like the DVD but its a bit out of my budget right now. I plan on upgrading to it in the future. Maybe the prices will drop and the speeds will increase by then.

Thanks for the other advise I will use it when setting up the new PC.

Thanks Again!
 
read the specs for your motherboard. the P4PE has 2 IDE jacks. so unless you aren't planning on having any internal CD/DVD drives, you are going to have to put your IDE drives on the same cable.

Kingston:
what difference does separate IDE cables for each HD make? are both HDs wired to the same pins? if so, how does the motherboard distinguish between the master and slave drive?

i'm upgrading as well, but i can't decide whether to go P4 or AMD.

go to tomshardware.com its a great resource for motherboard and cpu comparisons. I'm looking at the MSI motherboard with a 800mhz fsb.
 
Shane

You may want to concider using an Abit BE7-RAID. That will give you the ability to use RAID for your recording drives for better speed, or at the very least it will give you 4 independant IDE channels so none of your devices are hogging bandwidth from another.
 
Noise is a major issue if the pc is going to be in the same room. Therefore I would:

- swap the WD digital drives for seagate barracudas (which are much quieter).

- get a zalman quiet cpu cooler

- get a zalman quiet 400w power supply

More info at www.silentpcreview.com
 
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alfalfa said:
- swap the WD digital drives for seagate barracudas (which are much quieter).
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That all sounds fine except for swapping the hard drives for Seagates... I have yet to this date not one single Seagate IDE drive that has NOT failed on me. To this date I have zero Western Digital drives that have. In a business like this, I would stay VERY far away from Seagate unless you are running Seagate SCSI drives. There are mods you can do to the case which I am sure are outlined in the link given above, but BEWARE SEAGATE IDE DRIVES!
 
ShaneSelby said:
I thought it might make sense to just install the OS drive first and get the system up and running and then install the audio drive.
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This is exactly how I did it. Once you have your system running with one hd, just plug-in a second drive, give it a name and voila, there's your audio drive! Takes only a few minutes and its super simple coz Win XP will automatically recognize the second hd.
 
fierojoe -- that's low number statistics. Seagates are equally good as WD. There's no difference in terms of how fast they'll crash. They will all crash sooner or latter.
 
fierojoe said:
That all sounds fine except for swapping the hard drives for Seagates... I have yet to this date not one single Seagate IDE drive that has NOT failed on me. To this date I have zero Western Digital drives that have. In a business like this, I would stay VERY far away from Seagate unless you are running Seagate SCSI drives. There are mods you can do to the case which I am sure are outlined in the link given above, but BEWARE SEAGATE IDE DRIVES!
Click to expand...

That's kind of strange. My experience has been somewhat the opposite. The most common drives I see failing are Western Digital and Fujitsu (who no longer make IDE drives). Years ago Seagate IDE drives were not the greatest, but today they are a very high quality product. I recommend Seagate highly.
 
(cough) RAID (cough)...

I'm a huge advocate of RAID. I did it on my current computer and you would not believe the increase in drive performance. If you are looking for a good performance machine, do not over-look it.
 
Emeric said:
That's kind of strange. My experience has been somewhat the opposite. The most common drives I see failing are Western Digital and Fujitsu (who no longer make IDE drives). Years ago Seagate IDE drives were not the greatest, but today they are a very high quality product. I recommend Seagate highly.
Click to expand...
Maybe things are different with me, but I am making no joke or exaggeration when I tell you that I have had NO Seagate drive that didn't fail on me in what I would concider to be pre-mature. I even took the time to have one of them sent back under warranty to get it fixed and it wasn't but 2 months later that it failed again. I have had extremely good luck with my Western Digital drives. I have recommended them to countless people so far I haven't got any hate mail because of it. It has been a few (maybe 3) years since I have used a Seagate drive, but a 100% failure rate with me is a little hard to put aside... I know that everything will fail eventually, but I have Western Digital drives that are twice the age of my Seagates and they are still alive and kicking.
 
LOL sorry of have a different opinion on RAID also. I am working on a dual-processor machine with 4 HD, all sync'd by RAID5. Yes, the system is faster if it's up & running. However, each time I re-boot my machine it takes about 1/2 hr for RAID5 to synchronize the hard drives. During that period the computer is extreeeeemly slow. I would not recommend RAID at all unless you are building a network with lots of machines and lots of different HDs -- all cross-mounted -- and never switch it off. Just my 2 Cents.
 
Giganova said:
However, each time I re-boot my machine it takes about 1/2 hr for RAID5 to synchronize the hard drives. During that period the computer is extreeeeemly slow.
Click to expand...
LOL :D Yeah, SCSI Raid is a pain on boot, but IDE Raid like the Promise chipset or the HighPoint chipset really are very fast. The HighPoint RAID is built on-board of my Abit TH7II-RAID and it adds MAYBE 3-4 seconds to my boot time.
 
Now of course, the IDE interface isn't hot-swappable, so that's no fun. But, the IDE RAID really does give you an amazing performance boost without a whole lot of expense. The cost difference in an Abit BE7 and a BE7-RAID is only about $15, and just add one more drive for RAID 0 (fastest but LEAST secure), and you're up and running. Now, you can go with RAID 0+1, but you need 4 drives... That's a little more expensive and a little more noise, but that is the next fastest and your data is totally secure, unless you have 2 catastrophic HD failures at the exact same time. RAID 0+1 will give you striping for speed while still mirroring for data integrity. Or, you could just go RAID 1 for total mirroring and a smaller performance increase.
 
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