ide vs ultra dma/66 vs scsi ......

  • Thread starter Thread starter Eddie N
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Eddie N

Eddie N

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friends ,

im building a pc for home recording..and i have a few questions about hard drives... firstly , is it really that important to have seperate hard drives for windows and audio ? im on a limited budget ... so im tryin to cut the less critical corners.... im leaning towards the abit bx6 r2 mobo with a celeron 400 overclocked to 500 mhz.... and 128 mb's of pc 100 sdram to start...im trying to avoid an scsi hard drive becuz of obvious cost reasons so im eyeballing the ibm deskstar 22gxp 7200 rpm 18 gig ultra dma / 66 hard drive... heres the dilema... do i spend the extra 40 bucks on the abit be6 mobo with the onboard ultra dma controller or do i just use the regular ide controller of the bx6 r2...? the drive will still work...but it wont run up to its full potential ..will using the onboard ultra dma make that much of a difference speed wise ? im also worried about running out of IRQs... should i be ? if the speed of the ultra dma drive will closely rival an scsi drive utilizing the controller , i guess its worth the 40 bucks... if not... i should save the money , and the IRQ....

thanks....

- eddie -
 
I think it will come close to SCSI, but in any case it would be a false economy to save $40 now and kick yourself later...I've never heard of a disk that was too fast :-)

As to your first question, you will get the best results from separate drives only if you format them differently, i.e. 4k clusters for Windows and 32K clusters for audio, plus of course defrag every time you work (think of it like demagnetizing your heads :-) and yes you will need Norton for that as the built-in Windows defrag is all but useless and slower than a 386 running NT.


[This message has been edited by Dragon (edited 07-27-1999).]
 
why is it better to have two hard drives for recording one for windows and one for the music???
 
Ah, excellent question with several answers:

1. Windows creates a lot of little files that are always changing. These will cause disk fragmentation. If you're laying down audio, it gets written sequentially, which is very fast, unless there's fragmentation. So the best bet is to keep them on separate disks or even partitions.

2. It's more efficient for the hardware/software to read/write big gulps of data at once (large clusters), but it's more efficient for disk space on normal files to use small clusters. Audio files however are huge, which is not normal. You can solve both problems at once by formatting the way I mentioned above and keeping the audio on the disk or partition with the large clusters.
 
What dragon has stated is a simplistic explaination. I've built about 100 workstations (mostly graphics) and well... this would be the basis of my config.

-WINNT 4.0 SP5 (I'd also put on linux... but well whatever.)
-Asus P2B-S (or whatever the scsi model is, DS id you can afford it.) The S model has both UDMA and SCSI controlers on board.
-128 MB SDRAM
-PII 450 MHZ (only cause I don't like the "big brother inside" thing)
-A small (FAST too!) UDMA/33 Hardisk (2 gigs max)
-A REALLY BIG ULTRA-FAST-WIDE (etc) SCSI drive (like 10+ gigs).

I would check out: http://www.storagereview.com/
to find the best disks.

- Used monitor
- Used/cheapo graphics card.
- Soundcard that fits your fancy
- Quiet Fans from http://www.pcpowercooling.com if I can afford it (don't want fan on my vocal recording [if it's in the same place as the recording is going on]).


- Misc.

Once the machine was set up and bios configured I would use partition magic's rescue disk to partition the
UDMA/33 harddisk in two places. A 305 meg *FAT* partition at the FRONT of the drive with 64k sized clusters (the front of the drive is the fastest and large clusters are the fastest. The seperate partition also protects the swap against fragmentation-- thus more, you guessed it, FAST) (I took this idea from linux). I would then "hide" this partition and install WINNT on the other partition on the UDMA drive formatting NTFS.

Once in WINNT I would do the NT tweaks that can be found on the net, delete Internet explorer and the other little trash files the install left on there. Install UDMA bus mastering (only the intel ones work on mine for some reason) and scsi drivers. I'd install your sound software (sound forge.. .whatever). I would then use the current FREE beta of norton speed disk for NT (http://www.symantic.com). And I'd move your sound stuff to the front of the NTFS partition. (minimizes head movement between your swap file and your programs).
I'd install partition magic and activate the FAT SWAP parition. I would then create a 300 meg paging file on that parition and format the scsi drive FAT 64k cluster (partitioning if needed)

The scsi disk would be used strictly for audio.

Don't use DMA/66 it's a nonstandard abomination. Research all hardware througholy before buying... I use dejanews and pricewatch.com a lot.
 
opps.. sorry.. I meant unhide the swap partition NOT activate it (that would be a mess you up requiring the PM recovery disk again.) keep the second partition active. If the partition wasn't hidden... you're C: drive is the swap partition and that's not what you wanted... so make sure you do that.
-Tony Destro
Central Catholic High School: Pittsburgh http://www.pittcentralcatholic.org/
ProTech http://www.protechpts.com/
 
-A small (FAST too!) UDMA/33 Hardisk (2 gigs max)

Why the 2 GB max? Are you implying that other uses for the computer should be left to another platform?

Used/cheapo graphics card.

Every one of my video cards has gone south
before anything else in my system. First symptom being a funky flickering display.
A decent new 4MB AGP card ain't that pricey.

UDMA/33 harddisk in two places. A 305 meg *FAT* partition at the FRONT of the drive with 64k sized clusters (the front of the drive is the fastest and large clusters are the fastest.

Again: is this advice given with the assumption that no other apps will be sharing this platform?
 
Yes, when you say Graphics workstation or music workstation. That basically means that the platform is used for only or mostly that purpose and is geared for that purpose. I'm trying to save every penny here. You think a professional studio is gona' have anything else on their stuff? Two gigs is NOT a small drive either, I still have a 40 meg drive somewhere around. I wasn't sugesting that you follow my advice exactly.... geez

A decent new 4MB AGP card would be an inexpensive card, a card I was refering to.

The FAT partition is specifially for a WINNT swap file not some sound software's swap (that would go on the scsi, in the front again)... the applications would be kept on the NTFS part of the UDMA drive (which uses like 512 byte clusters).

This machine in front of me is configured in the manner with the swap file like that. ANY system would benefit from the swap config I discribed. Most other os's (ie: LINUX distros) operate like this by default with swap parititions... and even they're own specially made file system just for swaping (ie: linux swap) that's only new to windows.

-Tony

[This message has been edited by Tony Destro (edited 08-04-1999).]
 
I know the thread is pretty much dead, but...

Tony's setup sounds not too bad... I'd make a few minor changes myself, which I won't go into, plus one major change:

Don't get the on-board SCSI controller. Off-board controllers use significantly less processing time on the CPU, as well as minimal use of other system resources such as RAM. A seperate card is not only more efficient in terms of performance, but also more easily fixable and/or upgradeable in the future. On-board peripherals are, as Tony might say, and "abomination". ;-) Incidentally, don't ever get "integrated" video or sound in any system you might be purchasing. That path can only lead to ruination and damnation. <grin>
 
i guess my simple minded question would be: if you want to avoid any probems that would be caused by window's normal modus operandi, is a partition as good as using two drives?
 
Nero,

I'm sure there is some actual physical difference with the way 95/98 might interfere with the drives, but I don't know. I like having 2 drives, number 1 reason is safety. If the one drive burns up, at least all of your music is somewhere else. I backup songs on both drives and CD-R so that this never happens. Nothing like starting over with a song you've been working on for months..


A dual boot system is easiest. To muddle through all the techno-lingo thrown around here.. just partition, format. Format 64K clusters if it makes you feel better, but the performance of drives, processors and new standards don't leave a lot of optimizing left. The OS is the weakest link, keeping it uncluttered is the best way to improve performance, just my opinion though.

Unbalanced: yes for sure, the other reason to avoid onboard SCSI is you can swap your card out when your motherboard dies (which it will). Far better upgrade path. Reading again, I guess you said that.. :)



[This message has been edited by Emeric (edited 08-29-1999).]
 
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