Is it necessary to have 2 hard-drives for Sonar 2.0??

  • Thread starter Thread starter ranalli
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ranalli

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Pro-tools requires two hard-drives on your computer to run or at least on drive dedicated to music. Is this the case with Sonar as well? Will multitracking performance/mixdowns suffer unless I have a second 7200 rpm hard-drive??
 
I`m certain there would considerable benefit as far as data integrity and performace of the system by using a dedicated 7200 rpm ide for your Sonar data. However SONAR performs very well on a server in my home with a single 5400 rpm ide hd.
 
Toki said. Though most of us recomended using two HD, but SONAR it self will work just fine with single HD even 5400 RPM. I've got two HD one 5400 and one 7200 in my system. But once I tried use only 1 HD, it doesn't make the SONAR stop. Just consider the data integrity, writing accuracy, and more stable performance on system with 2 HD, specially if you work with a bunch of data (large number of tracks / long songs). Hey... where's moskus ?
 
James Argo said:
Hey... where's moskus ?
Click to expand...
:D Just relax. I'm around...

I'll just add a comment. If I had only one harddrive, I would use Partition Magic (or the like) to make two drives from one. That way your audio will be safe, even if you format the other partition.
 
Well it seems that some people are addressing the issue of safety of data while others are adressing speed/latency issues.

I'm not too worried about data safety.....just speed issues mostly along with multi-tracking. I could always try one drive first then see how things go with that.
 
I can tell you from experience that having a dedicated audio drive, and pointing Sonar to that drive will make a tremendous difference in the amount of tracks and plugin's you can run at once. You can purchase a 7200rpm 60GB drive for around $80 just about anywhere. It is well worth the expense.

Ed
 
yes sonusman it IS well worth the expense.

I even went so far as to set up a RAID0 configuration using two Wester Digital 7200rpm Ultra-ATA drives. So I have 1 drive for applications, and the RAID-0 configuration for the audio. The spikes that I would get from time to time when using 2 regular drives is gone, even when i've got a lot of tracks.

the reason it is better to have a dedicated hard drive for audio is that your seek time to find the spot where the audio is going to be recorded is virtually eliminated.

the Sonar program spends X clock cycles reading its own program, and Y clock cycles actually putting the data onto the hard drive. if for some reason the application has to read its program back into page memory instead of getting it from RAM, then the hard drive arm has to move to the spot where the Sonar application resides, then move back to writing the data.

That's also why having lots of RAM is important. The more RAM you have the less likely you'll have to fetch the Sonar application from the HD again.
 
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