Dividing Harddrives

fraserhutch said:
I argue that it is optimal to have your audio and data on a seperate disk installed on a IDE controller other than your system disk.

Partition a disk, with a few specific exceptions not related to DAWs, is generally done for organizational purposes.

Note, that here I am talking about audio and data files, not program files or applications or OSs.

I have emprically proven to myself and a few others that using a seperate disk and IDE controller improves throughput. Your mileage will vary, and this may not be an issue for you if your audio demands are not large, but for those of us who have a lot of audio tracks, it is.

I also argue that ensuring that the drive is on a seperate controller from the system disk helps immeasurably.

I also only have the single OS installed on my DAW. (I have dual boots on other systems). I have been on the internet from day 1, been doing this for well over 10 years, and have never had any problems. I can understand the argument for a seperate OS install, but I don't see a significant payoff.

As for raid, as Xstatic said, they are not generally installed for performance reasons, they are installed for redundancy and reliability. In fact, last time I used RAID (a few years back admittedly), I recall there being a significant performance hit. Maybe this has changed, but I personally would still not consider installing one for an DAW. Regular backups and archival are still your best weapon against data loss.

my $0.02.
Click to expand...


Nicely put. I don't understand what happened in the other thread. Anyway. Take care.


L8er,
livilaNic
 
I agree with Fraserhutch pretty completely. There may not be a significant improvement between having 2 OS's. I do feel however that having a second really helps to protect the first from malicious internet and/or software installs. I still would not put anything on a striped raid array. For an OS drive with a halfway decent computer a striped raid array will not add any noticable performance improvements but would greatly increase the risk of disaster and time consuming reloads. Striped arrays are typically used as temporary drives for high streaming processor intensive stuff like video editing and 3D rendering. But never as a drive that holds anything that isn't backed up. My audio drive is a mirrored array. It may technically add a small performance drop to to the system, but since I am running a professional studio and clients pay me good money, redundancy is a must. I can still stream 40+ mono 24/44.1 tracks with several vsti's and as many as 75+ plugins including 2 or 3 high sample convolution reverbs in real time with no problems.
 
I've been messin around with pc's for about five years now and I'm no expert but I think your original idea would be ideal for your purposes (how's that for a runon sentence). It's like having 2 systems. Personally, when I start adding drives, I plan to do it this way.

On your DAW hard drive you could disable any unnesessary hardware that's hogging irq's and system resources, make hardware settings specifically for a DAW, make many performance changes in your OS specifically for a DAW that would'nt be ideal for an everyday internet pc, install a customized version of win XP that does'nt include many unneeded system services for a DAW, quicker maintenance like defragging on your DAW drive, less wear and tear on your DAW drive, less clutter from other software, a simpler start menu and directories, no one pm'ing you while recording, no other software or internet to distract you while working on music.........I can go on forever. Why not have a customized, simple, clean, and stable setup on a seperate drive? You could even partition some gb's on this drive for files that don't get much use if your storage drive starts filling up. Same for the everyday pc drive. The thing is, for optimum speed, you want your project files and os/apps on seperate drives and ide channels when working on projects.

For your everyday drive, you are still free to try all that crappy beta software and surf porn and casino sites without the worry of destabilizing your DAW setup due to spyware, virus's, new hardware, etc. Even keep a copy of your favorite recording software on your everyday pc drive so you can catch those fleeting song ideas.

The dedicated storage drive is a given wether you're using one, two, or three drives. Hell if your using one drive in your system, at least partition it so that you can keep your files separate from your OS in case you need to reformat. I don't think your storage drive has to be dedicated to audio files but don't send your downloads to this drive and don't install software on this drive. Store them on your everyday drive in case of a virus or something.

Make a text file for logging any system/hardware changes and put a copy of it on all your drives. Also log your software settings in the file. That way, you can easily get back to that setup you worked hard on if any of the drives go down. Just make sure to update the file on all 3 drives when adding changes.

My current box has one drive, WD 80gb 8mb buffer, partitioned 20 gb and 60 gb for os/apps and storage. I'm also only running 256mb ddr. I don't have any problems when multitracking. I will admit though, currently, I rarely record more than 12 tracks and 2 at a time. When I start using more taxing software, more tracks at a time, and need more storage, I will add drives and memory.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I agree with your drive setup plan.......drive for os/apps for everyday use, drive for os/apps for daw use only, and a drive for primary storage. If for some reason you have to format a drive, or one goes down, you will have a much smaller pain in the ass to deal with. In the words of Offspring........."gotta keep em seperated"
 
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I personally think that building high-end PCs...

has moved beyond the abilities of the average joe. Anytime the tech starts advancing to the point that you have to dedicate a portion of your life to staying abreast of developments, and I believe that PCs have, go find an expert.
 
the technology is'nt moving that fast........I think any average joe that knows how to read can build and maintain a custom pc without devoting a chunk of life to it.
 
I just added a second hard drive and a stick of ram. My setup is just what was mentioned above and all looks well so far. I now have 2 80 gb wd se hard drives.

I installed the new drive as secondary slave, but put it first on the ide cable and my dvdrw second on the ide cable. I was told that setting up like this will not limit the transfer rate of the new hard drive to that of the dvdrw drive.

I transferred all of my files such as mp3's, project files, videos, etc. to the new drive. I then created a new partition on my old hard drive with partition magic and installed a stripped down version of xp pro, which I created with nlite. Basically, I stripped away anything I could think of that would be irrelevant to a DAW setup and the resulting install cd is a 240 mb version of XP Pro. My old system is still setup on the first partition and my new stripped down system is on the new partition. I roughly split the drive in half and both system partitions are hidden from each other and I'm using PQboot to switch between systems. All seems well so far. Having both OS's on one physical drive does'nt give me any drive failure protection but I think it will be nice to be able to record and mix on a clean and simplified system.

I also changed all settings that I could think of in the DAW system to enhance performance. Next I'm gonna disable any hardware that is'nt necessary to my DAW setup and see if it makes any difference.

Just thought I'd drop a line about this in case anyone else was thinking of doing it. I could'nt find any info on installing the same OS twice on one pc, even after googling like crazy. So, I backed up my system and went for it anyway. It works.
 
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