HD seek time

W

Wavlingth

New member
I'm trying to decide between a 250gig Lacie d2 and a PPA 200gig firewire400 drive.

My question is: Is there a huge difference in performance between an 8ms seek time and a 10 ms seek time when recording multiple tracks at once straight to the drive?

thanks in advance,
j
 
So long as you keep your recording drive well-defragmented, a seek time of 8ms vs. 10ms should make very little, if any, difference. Seek time is the measurement of how long it takes the reading heads to switch around to different parts of the drive (simplified explanation). If your drive is properly defragmented, then your audio data should be able to be stored in sequential tracks, and the heads should not have to be scrambling all across the hard drive.

Now, if you were to be recording on the same drive that windows and your recording software were installed, then seek time would make a huge difference. The heads would have to be able to rapidly switch between writing the audio data, reading program code for the recording program, and then also program code for the various windows functions.

Make sense?
 
sile2001 said:
So long as you keep your recording drive well-defragmented, a seek time of 8ms vs. 10ms should make very little, if any, difference. Seek time is the measurement of how long it takes the reading heads to switch around to different parts of the drive (simplified explanation). If your drive is properly defragmented, then your audio data should be able to be stored in sequential tracks, and the heads should not have to be scrambling all across the hard drive.

Now, if you were to be recording on the same drive that windows and your recording software were installed, then seek time would make a huge difference. The heads would have to be able to rapidly switch between writing the audio data, reading program code for the recording program, and then also program code for the various windows functions.

Make sense?
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot! That makes perfect sense. I'll actually be using an iBook with the program software on the internal drive and just recording audio signals straight to the external. My only worry about keeping the drive de-fragged is I'll most likely be adding and removing pictures and video files from the external drive fairly often.

Thanks again for the help!
 
Even under bad conditions both those seek times will be more than fast enough. The most important HD spec is sustained throughput:)
 
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