Hard-Drive Setup Question

M

mayan

New member
I have three hard-drives. The C: is a 30 gig Maxtor, D: is a 20 gig Seagate and E: is an 30 gig IBM. It is my intention to have a "dedicated" audio drive for musical applications like Sonar. Does it make sense to keep the application (Sonar) on one drive and all the audio on a dedicated audio drive? Or is it cool to keep Sonar and all of my masterworks on the same drive. I'm not clear on what will give the best performance.

Similarly, does it make more sense to keep acid loop and .wav files (which will be accessed by Sonar and Acid) on the drive with the application? In their own directory? On the "audio" hard-drive or to keep them on CDs for space purposes. Will their placement affect performance.

TIA...great forum!!
S.
 
mayan said:
I have three hard-drives. The C: is a 30 gig Maxtor, D: is a 20 gig Seagate and E: is an 30 gig IBM. It is my intention to have a "dedicated" audio drive for musical applications like Sonar. Does it make sense to keep the application (Sonar) on one drive and all the audio on a dedicated audio drive? Or is it cool to keep Sonar and all of my masterworks on the same drive. I'm not clear on what will give the best performance.
Click to expand...

Yes this makes sense, for both performance reasons and archiving purposes. If you get removable drive bays you could put both the 30GIG and the 20GIG into one (each) and swap them out as needed. If your operating system drive goes down, all of your audio data is safely (used loosly) stored on it's own seperate drive. This way you can just reformat the OS drive, reinstall windows and be back up and running much faster and easier.

Similarly, does it make more sense to keep acid loop and .wav files (which will be accessed by Sonar and Acid) on the drive with the application? In their own directory? On the "audio" hard-drive or to keep them on CDs for space purposes. Will their placement affect performance.

TIA...great forum!!
S. [/B]
Click to expand...

Again, I'd store Acid loops etc in it's own directory on your Audio Data only drive.
 
If I were you, I'd put my OS and other Apps on the 20gig drive, then use the other 2 30gig drives in a RAID 0 (striped) configuration for audio only. I think that would give you the best performance.
 
I use Vegas and sometimes all the proccessing I do to my waves causes the app to not read the data of the hard drive fast enough causing gapping in my audio play back. A solution they suggested was to NOT store all the audio for a project on 1 drive. Reading different waves off different drives enables the program to read better.

Just an FYI in case you run into this problem.
 
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