New Hard Drive

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:confused: I want to get a secondry Hard drive to fit into my PC as I have heard it helps the performance, I will be useing it with my current 60gig hard drive i got with my HP PC, I have been told that
The SATA "Western Digital Raptor 10k rpm drive" is very good for Cubase performance

I will need to get a PCI card to plug the SATA Drive into...

My Question is.....

Apart from the amount I can store in it, does it matter how big the hard drive is? ....80gig....120gig ...will it effect the performance?

any advice is cool!

Paul
 
10k rpm is really fantastic...you should have no issues with HD performance there!

It shouldn't matter what size the drive is, just make sure you defrag the drive after every session and you should have smooth sailing.
 
Yeah this guy in the Official Cubase room told me about it,

He said an internal one is better ...although I like the idea of having a seperat box..so you can take your stuff and load it up on any system.

will there be allot of difference in performance should I get a separate one?

And what's the score with USB2 and Firewire?, some people say USB is very fast, other say Firewire is the fastest ..??

thanks
 
I regluarly do as many as 24 tracks with an external firewire drive (7200 RPM) and don't have any issues with it. Internal drives do work faster, but it shouldn't be an issue to go with either a USB 2.0 or a firewire drive.

Darryl.....
 
We just bought a USB 2.0 external drive to use to back stuff up and port between two systems. As a matter of ease we tried running a project off of it once. It came no where near the performance of the internal drives. It seemed to take a while to load all the tracks so that when you hit play it was a good 4 or 5 seconds before all the tracks kicked in.
 
xstatic said:
We just bought a USB 2.0 external drive to use to back stuff up and port between two systems. As a matter of ease we tried running a project off of it once. It came no where near the performance of the internal drives. It seemed to take a while to load all the tracks so that when you hit play it was a good 4 or 5 seconds before all the tracks kicked in.
Click to expand...

I am am expecting a UAD-1 card and am running out of PCI slots....i do have a USB2 card with an exra sockit ...inside the PC box...would this work for an internal drive running on USB2, if so what type should i look for??
 
If you're going to put the drive internal then don't use the USB drive. Just hook up an IDE drive up as another hard drive on your ribbon cable that has your primary drive on it (or install a second cable into the spare controller output of your motherboard if it has one). The high speed SATA drives are nice but you'll need to use up a PCI slot, whereas you don't need an extra card for the IDE drives.

As far as the firewire drives I use, the files that I have used successfully inlcude 45 minute live sessions of 20+ tracks at 24/48 being mixed in Cubase SL along with a number of plug-ins. And this is on a 1.6 GHz/P4 laptop with only 256 Mb RAM.

Darryl.....
 
Your Answer is......

Yes, you need a second drive, internal, doesnt matter what size as long as its above 10 gig, set paging to ZERO on your first drive(C:), SIZE OF PHYSICAL RAM on the second, and max to approx 3 times over the physical, or just set to system managed.
Why you say?
Well, because its WAY faster to have paging all being done on a completely different drive than the one with the os installed.

After this I suggest;
CachemanXP (Software, dont waste time, buy it, it works)
Disable INDEXING.
Disable THEMES
Disable ANY eyecandy, including the nifty background images.
There is more(lots) you can do, but I dont have the energy to type it all.....
 
I wouldn't suggest you put your page file on the second hard drive if you intend to use that second hard drive as the working directory for streaming your audio data. Putting the page file on the second drive defeats the purpose of having the OS on one drive and the audio on the other.
Sure moving the page file to a separate drive other than the one Windows is on will speed up Windows, but who gives a rats ass about Windows. We want to be sure that the audio stream isn't interrupted by the OS and it's paging to the drive. :cool:
Plus if you have upward of 1 Gig of RAM, you will do fine just setting the Min and Max page file size to anywhere between 600 and 800 Megs ... no need for different Min and Max sizes. I set mine at 800 on drive C: only and have no issues what so ever. Any way, it's always better to add more Physical RAM than it is to increase your Virtual Memory.
Also, most 7200 RPM ATA 100\133 drives with DMA enabled and the proper IDE cable (80 conductor) will do just fine with multiple audio data streams. No real need to drop the cash on a SATA drive and controller, unless you just want to.
 
Hmmmm

Well....First off you can throw all the ram at it you want and windows will
still use the page file, feel free to prove me wrong.
Its a kernel thang.
Look it up.
Secondly, if you speed up windows, which you agreed it would do, you just increased the transfer rate for all data in general, and improved your chances of a perfect stream.
Thirdly, if you use cachemanxp to do the tweaks Ive done for years manually, editing the registry and so forth, it works even better, I didnt just throw this out here for the fun of it, Ive lived it.

The whole question is speeding up transfer, I agree with that part, but saying that speeding up the system as a whole isnt a VERY good way to increase speed is a little confusing at best.
 
Alrighty then ....
Do as you like ... have the OS paging to your audio drive while it's trying to transfer multiple audio data streams. Ain't gonna bother me none. Also, if you want to test something .... turn off paging .... XP will still work! :eek: I wouldn't suggest doing that with under 512Megs RAM though.
Maybe I'm wrong, but last I knew ... Hard Drive throughput (transfer rate) was dictated by hardware not software.

Check out MusicXP to tweak for DAW work. They list some other useful links as well.
 
SCFROMDC said:
Yes, you need a second drive, internal, doesnt matter what size as long as its above 10 gig, set paging to ZERO on your first drive(C:), SIZE OF PHYSICAL RAM on the second, and max to approx 3 times over the physical, or just set to system managed.
Why you say?
Well, because its WAY faster to have paging all being done on a completely different drive than the one with the os installed.

After this I suggest;
CachemanXP (Software, dont waste time, buy it, it works)
Disable INDEXING.
Disable THEMES
Disable ANY eyecandy, including the nifty background images.
There is more(lots) you can do, but I dont have the energy to type it all.....
Click to expand...




CachemanXP (Software, dont waste time, buy it, it works).....WHAT IS THIS?
 
with the ahrd drive is it nesasery to have a 8MB Buffer on the hard drive as i have seen some with this...cheers
 
Slightly faster transfer rate with 133.
100 MBps as opposed to 133 MBps.
Next up would be SATA at 150 MBps.
 
i see thanks.

also how inportant is it to use an 8 MB buffer, as some have 2 and some have 8...??

cheers
 
Copied from Here .......
Harddrive Cache, Harddrive Buffer: most harddrives have RAM built in that stores often accessed sectors. The buffer is also used for read-ahead purposes. When software reads a sector from disk, it often will also want to read the next sector, but only after processing data from the first sector. If the software requests the next sector after the processing-delay, that next sector may have already rotated away under the drive's read/write head, and thus it will take an extra revolution of the disk to read that next sector. The read-ahead mechanism mostly reads in an entire track, or even tries to predict which sectors may be requested next. Pretty complicated algorithms may be in use for this. ..........

The way I see it .... the larger the Cache/Buffer the more data can be stored for often accessed sectors or read-ahead data.
As far as any performance implications between the two (2MB vs 8MB) .... I can't say as all of my drives are of the 8MB flavor.
 
ok cheers, i got it?

the one i am getting for audio has a 8 buffer, and i am also thinking of changing the hard drive i have in there now on my C drive and was wondering if it was worth making that an 8 buffer too.

thanks for the help
 
2nd hard drive

A few more pointers for you.

If you are installing a 2nd hard drive and want more performance, I would recommend that you install the 2nd drive on the 2nd IDE channel of your motherboard. This way you don't have two hard drives sharing one channel. Using the two IDE channels will help with the one channel bottleneck.

Also, I just switched to a drive that has an 8mb cache. It does seem to work well. Of course, this depends on how often the drive goes after the same data.

I've read reviews where ATA133 doesn't outperform ATA100 in the real world due to so many other bottlenecks on the system, so I don't think that may be a big concern. In other words, ATA133 doesn't get to reach it's full capacity. A search on the net would probably give some good pointers (ata133 vs ata100).

Hope I've helped out.
 
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