New Audio PC / Hard Drive Performance

  • Thread starter Thread starter mark4man
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mark4man

mark4man

MoonMix Studios
Finally about to purchase a new PC for my studio; & had two questions concerning speed (& performance in general) as related to hard drives.

The machine will come with one drive; & I'll add a second, in order to be able to run my multitracking software from one drive & have my audio data on the other:

1) How much more advantageous is Serial ATA Connection over Parallel ATA Connection?

2) How much more advantageous is RAID linking?

My other major inquiry is...for speed, reduced latency; & overall performance in general, will the benefits be the result of the abovementioned improvements in drive technology, or will they come from having the latest CPU, bus speeds, etc.?

Thanks in advance,

mark4man
 
The serial ATA, at this time, will not give you any increase in speed. Read some reviews if you're still interested in paying the premium, but the first release of serial ATA is nothing spectacular, other than it's cool little cables and plug in. It WILL get much faster in the future, though.
RAID is a nice feature. I use it for my video editing machine, and it does allow considerably faster writing to IDE drives. Make sure you ONLY hook up one IDE drive per IDE channel on your RAID interface, though, and put them in stiped mode [raid 0] to get the performance increase. Of course, your cost goes up, because you must purchase 2 drives...worth it IMHO.

Jed
 
I agree on S-ATA vs. P-ATA with Jedman but with the hard drives that are on the market today, striping is imho overkill. Hard drives are very fast nowadays and multitracking only requires a few megabytes/sec. Yes, it may be cool for video-editing but that is a much more demanding task.
Go for 7200rpm drives instead of 5400rpm. That will bring down the latency.
 
yep, SATA is a crock of shit right now. The controllers suck. One day it will be good though. follow the usual rule of thumb: avoid the first generation of anything. Why pay a premium price to be a beta tester? I use RAID but only find the extra speed useful for large projects 40+ tracks and for rendering. you should be fine with a 7200 rpm drive unless you plan on doing hair metal with 30+ guitar tracks. However the redundancy feature of RAID is always welcome.
 
Thanks, All

Jedman, christiaan, sweetnubs,

Thanks people, you've been a great help.

mark4man
 
7200 rpm drives are all fast enough for your needs. I think the key issue is noise which is why I recommend seagate barracuda IV or V as they are significantly quieter than their competitors.
 
alfalfa said:
7200 rpm drives are all fast enough for your needs. I think the key issue is noise which is why I recommend seagate barracuda IV or V as they are significantly quieter than their competitors.
Click to expand...

Very true. And if you really want the quietest, you'd need to look for the 40 and 60 GB drives Barracuda V's (less than 30dB on seek!!). The 80 and 120 GB drives are somewhat noisier, still very quiet.
 
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