New Drive

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BoogieBoy

New member
Hello all. I wanted to ask your opinions. I just bought a new desktop computer that I will plug in to my home studio (FW-1884 Tascam Board; UAD-1 plug-in card; several preamps & compressors; mikes). My old machine was just getting too pokey and crash-prone. While I was at Best Buy, I also bought a small 120 GB external drive; I don't want my DAW streaming data to the same disk my OS is on, etc. Now I'm thinking I should have bought an extra internal drive instead. For one thing, the external one I bought only spins at 5400 rpm, while I believe I should be running at 7200. The new computer, however, claims to have a 320 Gb "SATA" hard drive disk. Is this different from the IDE drives I'm used to? And if I wanted to go with the internal, would I have to specify a 7200 RPM SATA disk? It needn't have a ton of capacity; I do most of my work at 24/48000, and I can store mixdowns on the stock drive - I just don't want to do my actual live tracking on it - I think it should have a separate dedicated drive.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Rudi
 
You have 2 things going against you: USB (I'm assuming it's a Western Digital Passport or similar?) and 5400 RPM. Not a good combination for having more than 8 or 12 tracks playing back simultaneously.

SATA (serial ATA) is different from IDE (parallel ATA) in the way it transmits data. The current generation of SATA drives spinning at 7200 RPM can theoretically deliver about 3 times as much throughput of the last generation of IDE spinning at 7200 RPM.

Another internal SATA drive would be best, but make sure you actually have space inside the case. I know Gateway and HP and whatnot cram all kinds of media card readers and fancy things and generally don't leave room from more drives.
 
fuzzrhythm said:
(I'm assuming it's a Western Digital Passport or similar?)
Click to expand...

You assume correctly. Am I on the right track thinking that I should be using a second drive for tracking only? And you said USB was a negative - why is that? Slow data transfer? Would Firewire improve that? I understand there is 400 and 800 firewire. For whatever reasons, my new computer came with zero firewire outlets, so I had to buy a FW PCI card...but it only mentions the 400 transfer rate. Isn't USB 2.0 about as fast as FW? Other issues?
Thanks again!
 
The best thing to do would be to check inside your new computer to see if you have room for a second hard drive. If so, get a 7200rpm SATA hard drive and install it, and maybe return the USB drive if you can, or keep it and use as general file backup. If you don't have space inside the machine, you would be best served using a firewire-based external hard drive, as the USB drives don't work very well for constant transfer. I have a USB 2.0 external, and it can;t handle three tracks of steady playback, on my mac laptop. Firewire, however, works great. I believe the difference lies in how the data is handled by the computer between whatever is creating/accessing it and the storage device in use.

While both interface types (USB 2 and firewire 400) have similar ratings for max data throughput, firewire seems to work much better for sustained transfer, whereas USB is fine for transferring files back and forth, but seems to be really flakey when transferring audio at a specific rate. To get firewire ports, you can simply buy a PCI firewire card, like the following:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815255014

Easy to install, and work very well.
 
Also, please shorten your Location setting... homerec/bbs doesn't wrap them around, so anyone with a monitor smaller than 30" sees your text stretched beyond the sides of their screen. I don't like having to move the horizontal slider back and forth like I am using a typewriter just to read posts :D
 
Me too.

cusebassman said:
Also, please shorten your Location setting... homerec/bbs doesn't wrap them around, so anyone with a monitor smaller than 30" sees your text stretched beyond the sides of their screen. I don't like having to move the horizontal slider back and forth like I am using a typewriter just to read posts :D
Click to expand...


Yes, shorten the length. Gotta scroll horizontally to read your posts.
 
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