Hard disk config

[Shakuan]

I was thinking about my hard disk setup for my next computer-studio...

Would it be a good idea to use a small and fast scsi HD for the programs like Cubase SX and have a big 7000rpm HD to record the big wavs?

I mean... Having the recording software on a seperate drive of the recorded files... wouldn't taht lag the process or something?

Does it really make a difference in the software speed when it's on a scsi drive? (cuz scsi isnt cheap you know)...

or would it just be better to have only 1 big drive? (cuz that way the recorded wavs stay on the same HD as the recording software which means no HD to Hd transfer...)

I'd like to know the best way to set up HDs so that it's really fast but doesnt cost too much (no big scsi drive... I dont mind buying a small one tho...)

or maybe should I just buy 1 big sci drive for everything (which I guess wouldnt cost much more than 1 small scsi + 1 big IDE)...

thanx alot!

 

[Barometer]

Check out a thread called 2 hard drives in this forum. Maybe a couple pages back. It might help

 

[Stealthtech]

Todays drives are quite sufficient enough to handle the job.
I have a dual boot on one 40 gig 7200 rpm with all software on second partition, and a second drive 40gig 7200 rpm dedicated to audio only. When you record your audio, it does'nt stay within the program itself, it goes wherever you tell it to go. If you command that it be recorded to C drive or D drive thats where it shall reside. I do not experience any problems with this issue. Although SCSI is faster, its not a real issue worth spending the money on.

 

[muskgrave]

RAID 0

If you want to get closer to the speed of scsi without all the money you may want to consider purchasing 2 fast ide drives and a raid controller, then set it up in RAID 0 configuration. This basically makes the computer see the 2 drives as one and almost doubles the read/write speed. You can buy 2 IBM 40GB 120GXP drives (good quality FAST ide drives) and a HighPoint RAID pci controller card with shipping and all for a little under 195. This will give you almost 80mb/sec transfer rates. You may be thinking that 80gb is too much but the 40gb drives are only about 3 dollars more than the 20, so it's best just to go ahead and get the extra...you might remember when the 1gb drives first came out we all thought that was ridiculous.."noone will ever need that much space!" HA!

Or you could spend spend about 400 and get a 36gb ibm scsi drive and scsi card with transfer rates of 160mb/sec. The choice is up to you. I guarantee you will notice a HUGE difference just with the RAID 0 configuration. Let me know if you have any other questions.

dlv

 

[muskgrave]

RAID 0

If you want to get closer to the speed of scsi without all the money you may want to consider purchasing 2 fast ide drives and a raid controller, then set it up in RAID 0 configuration. This basically makes the computer see the 2 drives as one and almost doubles the read/write speed. You can buy 2 IBM 40GB 120GXP drives (good quality FAST ide drives) and a HighPoint RAID pci controller card with shipping and all for a little under 195. This will give you almost 80mb/sec transfer rates. You may be thinking that 80gb is too much but the 40gb drives are only about 3 dollars more than the 20, so it's best just to go ahead and get the extra...you might remember when the 1gb drives first came out we all thought that was ridiculous.."noone will ever need that much space!" HA!

Or you could spend spend about 400 and get a 36gb ibm scsi drive and scsi card with transfer rates of 160mb/sec. The choice is up to you. I guarantee you will notice a HUGE difference just with the RAID 0 configuration. Let me know if you have any other questions.

dlv

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Those are peak transfer rates, not sustained transfer rates. I have yet to a SCSI drive outperform an ATA drive by a large enough margin to warrant the cost of the controller or drives...even the 10K drives aren't very fast with large file operations. It's actually kind of baffling suprising - I've seen a lot of 10K SCSI numbers that are WORSE than my 7200RPM ATA numbers!

A single 7200RPM ATA drive can handle 32 24/96 tracks without blinking. The hard drive is no longer the bottleneck. In fact, if expect to get about 15MB/sec sustained transfer from a drive (which is probably a bit above average), that's enough for 52 tracks of 24/96 audio. If you're working at 24/44, as many of us are, that's enough for 113 tracks.

Also, since most software reads audio from the disk as it processes (as opposed to image processing in which an entire image must be read into memory before it is processed), having a faster HD system will mostly likely not offer any substantial increase in audio performance. For instance, if I apply a decent reverb to a 50MB track using Wavelab, it might take up to 20-30 seconds to process (it can actually take several minutes for some high quality plugins), which is 5 to 6 times slower than the disk read operation (e.g. it would only take about 5 seconds to read the entire file, which means that the reading process itself is not holding anything up).

Even with 2+ Ghz processors I don't believe that the drive would hold things up much unless you're doing something like running a plugin that doesn't take much CPU time over a large batch of files. In this case the drive could very well be a major bottleneck; but how often do you do this? If it's a lot, then perhaps RAID is a good option.

It should be noted that ATA RAID has a history of being problematic and not putting up decent numbers. Also, RAID 0 doubles your chances of drive failure, since data is striped across two drives - if either fails, then you're hosed. RAID 5 or 0+1 is a better solution but then you're getting into a lot more money. SCSI RAID is very proven but extremely expensive. I'm not anti-RAID, either...being a power-hungry geek I think it's great....but the audio side of me has a hard time justifying it.

Your mileage may vary, and there WILL be a time again when the hard drive becomes the bottleneck, just like it was a few years ago! 4Ghz processors are on the horizon!

Slackmaster 2000

 

[webstop]

Hey Shakuan,
Whatever hardware route you choose, I suggest you carefully think about the following.
All big drives come with their own partitioning software, which allow to overcome maximum partition size limit of your operating system by putting their own driver onto boot sector. Technically you can have all you huge drive as one partition, if you want. Looks very convenient..?
What I learned hard way is that using this kind of software is setting up a timebomb. If for whatever reason your boot sector becomes corrupted, and you reboot from CD or floppy your system will see all big partitions as unformated. You will not be able to restore partition table without reformatting, so all your data will be lost...
I had that happen, so trust me on this one.
At present I don't have any single partition larger than 32 GB (FAT32 in win2000). As a result I have 8 hard drive letters, but this is a minor incovenience compared to loosing the data...

Modern IDE drives are getting close to the speed of SCSI. I have three Seagate IV Barracudas, and my largest project is 29 stereo tracks of 24/88.1 wav files: with proper buffer settings the drive inducator does not even spike to 25%. It appears that I can double my tracks count, and the drives will handle that with no big sweat. Why need RAID or expensive SCSI?

Always have operating system and software on a separate partition. This will leave the data intact in case of OS upgarde or emergency.