T
track pusha
New member
Are ata drives ok for audio. I was told to only use sata drives but i'm wondering how true that is.
bennychico11
...
not at all true....many many people in home studios and pro studios use IDE/ATA. many people even use firewire, which is slower.
RawDepth
New member
Yes, ATA drives are fine as long as they are not antique. If you will get into recording 24 or 36 tracks simultaneously, or perhaps 12 or more at ultra high resolution, it may become a concern but, not for everyday stuff.
Some folks on this board love to "overkill" when they give advice.
Some folks on this board love to "overkill" when they give advice.
T
track pusha
New member
bennychico11
...
should be fine...i have a couple. some people have mixed opinions on WD drives and reliability in the long run, but i haven't had any big problems with them....as long as you take care of it.
JazzMang
He's Junktastic!
There are just as many maxtor haters as WD haters, Seagate haters, and IBM haters. everyone has their brand preference/loyalty. Stick with what you like... the difference between them is minimal in most circumstances.
Codmate
New member
As long as it's spinning at at least 7200rpm and is at least ATA133 you'll be fine.
Keep 'em defragmented and all your audio projects on a seperate partition
Keep 'em defragmented and all your audio projects on a seperate partition
A
AGCurry
New member
Never had a problem with my Western Digital ATA-100 drives. We don't have to be on the bleeding edge.
bennychico11
...
the only problem i've had with them is that they can be kind of noisey when spinning. however, if you have an enclosure or have it in another room, that probably won't be problem. but they definitely aren't the loudest drives I've heard.
JazzMang
He's Junktastic!
Codmate said:Keep 'em defragmented and all your audio projects on a seperate partition
If anything, a seperate partition located towards the end of the drive will only increase the chance of hard drive failure, as excessive drive head movement will eventually cause the drive to die.
psst - ATA133 is useless. I can plug in a 120 GB ATA100 drive and another 120 GB ATA133 drive and show you that the difference is nil. ATA133 might as well be the ATA group's most useless designation. ATA133 builds in more protocol overhead as well as a slightly higher peak burst rate. unfortunately, no one makes any hard drive that is ATA133 and actually hits 133 megs/sec burst rate.Codmate said:
Codmate
New member
JazzMang said:
Well - I've not had a drive die on me yet *touches wood*
Keeping audio projects in a seperate partition (or even better an entirely seperate physical disk) speeds up access times when opening projects though.
I have a Maxtor ATA133 drive and a Seagate ATA100 drive and yes, the differece is negligable - but I believe a WD-Raptor might use some of the extra bandwidth.
reshp1
New member
I think mostly WD, Maxtor, Seagate are equivalent in performance reliability, but I've never heard a HD as quiet as the Seagate. That's what sold me.
JazzMang
He's Junktastic!
Codmate said:
Actually, having your audio files on a properly defragmented primary partition (at the start of the disc) will yield faster results, due to the way the HDD works. Data that is stored closer to the 'front' (where the boot sector lies), is at the optimal area on the hard drive that yields the fastest seek times and the fastest data throughput. I do agree that having a physically separate drive would be best, but having a partition is never a good idea, unless convenience is your first priority and data fidelity is not.
Codmate said:
Um.... a raptor is not ATA133... its SATA, gen. I.
Codmate
New member
JazzMang said:
I don't quite understand. How do you guarentee that your audio data is 'at the front of the disk' if you don't partition it away from other data that may be on the drive? Personally I run 2 HDD's - one that has my O/S and applications and one for audio data and 'other data' (otehr media, docs etc). I keep the audio data in the primary partition of the second HDD and use the extended partitions for all the other crap.
It works well for me!
I've also been assured by a friend who works in IBM's HDD R&D that physical placement of data on the disk hasn't been much of an issue since the days of 5400rpm drives and single platters, and that fragmentation is a much bigger factor in read/write speeds when loading multiple large files (as is done when opening a multi-track project).
BTW - there was an ATA133 Raptor, I got sent a review edition. Maybe they never released it?
JazzMang
He's Junktastic!
What I am saying is that if you have a 100 gig HDD, and you partition it oddly, like 70 gigs for system boot partition and the remaining 30 gigs (which would be located towards the end of the disc) for audio files, your data throughput would suffer. Additionally, while loading up a project, your drive head would be thrashing around from beginning of disc (where your OS files/drivers and most likely your mixing software is located) and the end of the disc (where the sound files are stored). This would result in longer load times and inability to multitask (if you wanted to do that while playing back 20+ tracks in the background).Codmate said:
As far as physical placement on the disc causing failures... thats not what i said. I stated that the additional strain placed on the drive head by having to access files at the front of the drive and then the back of the drive simultaneously will eventually shorten the life of the drive head. All moving parts get worn out.... its a fact of life.
As far as the raptor goes, there has never been an official ATA-protocol release of the raptor, AFAIK. Although it would be possible b/c the raptor was inherently designed on ATA spec, but was then outfitted with a SATA bridge for use with SATA interfaces.
altiris
New member
fragmentation has little effect in speed. but it can cause problems when you are writing big files. Since files will not be written fragmented. One file is one file and if a 200MEG file is larger than the fragment it can become corupt. It will not write a part of a single file in a location then the rest of it in nother.
BentRabbit
New member
track pusha said:
That drive should be fine as long as you're running XP or 2000...
Win98SE and ME have a 137 gig partition limit, and 127 gig limitation for defrag and scan disk....
T
track pusha
New member
How hard is it to put a hard drive in your computer.
JazzMang
He's Junktastic!
altiris said:
You're kidding me, right?
altiris said:
its called 'file fragmentation'... As in, fragments/file. so yes, the files will be split up into seperate areas on the disc... thats why they call it fragmentation.
JazzMang
He's Junktastic!
Not hard if you know what you are doing. Much easier to go with a Serial ATA Hard drive if you've never messed around with jumpers before (assuming your motherboard supports SATA).track pusha said:
Google it for more info.