HD performance for 24-bit/96KHz

[DropD]

Right now I working in 16-bit/48KHz because that's all my soundcard will do (Yamaha OPL3-SA chipset). I have a Seagate Medalist Pro HD that spins at 7200RPM (fast-IDE). According to the little utility program on Echoaudio's website, I can do 20tracks at the same time. If I get a 24/96 sound card (I intend on getting the Aardvark Direct Pro 24/96), it will of course take more ressource if I want to use the 24/96 quality, probably allowing me to do less than 10 tracks. I need more than that, I don't really want to bounce track, I want to keep all my tracks intact until final mixing. I already have a pretty fast HD, what kind of HD do I need to get to do at least 16 digital tracks in 24/96? Will SCSI HDs really be THAT fast? I'm not too aware of the average transfer rate of a SCSI hard drive.

 

[cwillu]

In order to move 16 tracks of 24/96 audio of your hard drive, it would have to be able to move 8 megs per second. My 5400rpm ide drive will do about 2.6megs/s, I'm not sure how much faster a 7200rpm drive would go, probably around 3-4 megs/s. At this rate, you wouldn't be able to play 16 tracks at 96khz, but you could get close to 16 tracks at 48khz; bearing in mind that 96 khz may or may not affect the audio quality that much...
Slackmaster could probably fill in these numbers better than I can ... and I have no clue as to scsi transfer rates, but you might want to see if recording at 96 khz is actually worth the resources.

Good luck!

William Underwood

 

[MrScotti]

SCSI2 transfers at 80Mbps and is probably the thing to do with HD recording, even the CD-RW application of it as it is much, much faster than EIDE/IDE/UltraDMA/etc. The drawback is that it costs quite a bit more, Adaptec makes some great SCSI controller cards(like the 2940U2W) which has 2 68pin internal connections, 1 50 pin internal, and a 68 pin external connector for about $400, Seagate makes the Cheetah Ultra2 SCSI drives at 10,000rpms and the Barracuda Ultra2's which run at 7,200rpms, about $400 and $300 respectively for 9.1GB. Then you have CD-R/RW, you probably want a RW(ReWritable) for versatility, and as far as brand name...I have heard quite a few draw rave reviews across the gambit, Teac, Sony, Yamaha, etc, probably aroun $300-$400 for a decent Ultra2 SCSI CDRW.
This is the way it has been in the computing industry also, home PCs ship with EIDE/UltraDMA HD's, game-type graphics cards(Voodoo, TNT, etc) and Pentium or Celeron chips whereas 'workstation' PC's come with Xeon Processors, onboard SCSI & peripherals, Elsa, Appian graphics cards(megabucks), but they always cost about 5x more than their "home PC" couterparts. In the world of PC recording I think the 3 biggest issues are RAM, sound interface(how the sound gets in), and 'internal architecture'(how the sound is stored, manipulated and trnsferred within the PC). So I wouldn't worry about having a killer processor or video card...decent home PC's come nicely equipped(usually) but a SCSI card is a good investment if you're serious about PC recording. Hope this helps. -MrScotti

 

[JoelJunkie]

Hey!

I am building my own computer-Pent. 3 500mhz, 128RAM,-and I have a 20gig IBM Desktar UDMA/66 7200rpm. I read an earlier post that said that UDMA/66 is an abomination to audio recording. I didn't quite understand it. It still transfers data at 66MB a sec. right? I also read something about how partition settings can effect performance. I had a little trouble understanding this.

Any info will help.