Question about hard drives and ideal setup.

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Soulgolem

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Hello all, I'm looking for some advice concerning computer hard drives. I will soon be buying an external hard drive to complement the hard drive already in my PC. I was thinking of installing windows on both drives and booting from the external one when I want to record. Now there's a lot of choices in external hard drives, I'm not sure which one I should get, what should I be looking at, any specefic model good for recording needs ?

Also, how should I configure my setup for optimal speed ? Like i said I would boot from the external drive, but maybe there's a better way to work this, should I partition it a certain way maybe ?

I appreciate the help, thanks.
Francis.
 
I don't think you'd want to boot from the external drive. Put all your applications and OS on the primary master had drive. Boot to that one. Configure your recording application to place files on either
1)Secondary internal drive - make sure it is fast, at least 7200RPM is preferred
2)External Drive - You'll probably want to make sure it is firewire, but USB2 might work.
 
I do not agree with using the recording station as a general purpose computer. YMMV. Just because they are separate, does not mean a virus cannot get to the DAW drive when the general purpose system is booted.

My DAW has all non-essential services disabled, no anti-virus, no nuttin' except the recording essentials.

That said, if you are going to dual boot, then run the DAW from the onboard disk system, preferably SATA-II, and boot the general purpose system from the external device. You want the (much) better disk performance for the recording side.
 
Soulgolem said:
Hello all, I'm looking for some advice concerning computer hard drives. I will soon be buying an external hard drive to complement the hard drive already in my PC. I was thinking of installing windows on both drives and booting from the external one when I want to record. Now there's a lot of choices in external hard drives, I'm not sure which one I should get, what should I be looking at, any specefic model good for recording needs ?

Also, how should I configure my setup for optimal speed ? Like i said I would boot from the external drive, but maybe there's a better way to work this, should I partition it a certain way maybe ?

I appreciate the help, thanks.
Francis.
Click to expand...

Why buy external? Are you out of space inside the box? 200gb Seagate IDE drives are only $50 AR these days.
 
where can i get that 200gb seagate for 50 from? haha. my 160 samsung just died.

anyway, i wouldn't boot from an external. ribbon cables are better than firewire anyday, i feel like. ha.
 
An external would be good for me because I will often want to bring big files to my buddy who also records and share some things we've recorded.

How about this for optimizing performances :

1- Internal 80 gigs HD booting for recording with the softwares and pluggins.
2- External 200 gigs to put the recorded audio and other big files,
3- Internal 200 gigs HD for booting normally, general purpose computer.

I cannot afford two computers so i'll have to go this way. Does is make sense ?

Also, what external and internal HD would you recommend for my purposes ? I already have the 80 gigs HD, but I'm not sure about the specs, should I just worry about having the 7000 rpm and 8 mo cache, I could always purchase a fast 80 gigs hard drive (around 10k RPM) for the recording softwares if you tell me it could help.

Thanks.
Francis.
 
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Keep in mind you can easily partition a single drive into multiple partitions so you can boot to multiple OSs easily. So you could get away with 2 drives - An 80GB should work fine for your System O/S which can be for booting to either your recording OS or your "everyday" OS. Then you have a 200GB internal drive for all your data.
 
IMO, the SoundOnSound author appears to be a partial idiot. Either that, or he is a research-the-web librarian with no actual computer hardware experience.

Recommending FAT32 instead of NTFS is one sure sign of idiocy.
Disabling/Uninstalling ACPI and IRQ Steering is another good sign.

Uninstalling useless apps, stopping unneeded services and disabling eye candy is far more advantageous for better performance. I've done this on my system, and my commit footprint is a tiny 53mb, down from 128mb, just by taking these simple steps.

Installing plenty of RAM (resulting in more disk cache) will override any minute performance advantages the fragile FAT32 file system has over the far more robust NTFS.
 
I use 3 drives, all internal

Disk 1 :Maxtor 160Gig 7200rpm 8Meg cache system disk....... This disk is partitioned in 2 halves and runs a duel boot system. 80 Gig for windows XP that does all my internet crap and DTP. 80 Gig for a stripped down windows XP and my recording apps.


Disk 2: Maxtor 60Gig 7200rpm 8Meg cache ....... sample storage disk

Disk 3: Maxtor 160Gig SATA ......recording disk, nothing on here but audio files recorded at 24/48. I work using a new folder for each band and a new folder inside that for each song. When the session is tracked I back up everything to DVD. When the session is finished I delete the folders with everything backed up to DVD as data.

I can see your point of wanting to go external for portability, but the price of blank DVD's makes a lot more sense to me. YMMV
 
I am new to digital recording, but I know a little about resource-intensive applications.

One of my applications uses a ton of memory, and it was recomended to use a dedicated SCSI hard disk for the pagefile. I use small system drives (60 gb), a 10gig scsi fo the page file and use one of those drawer things with a 160 or 200 gig slave drive for data. Most of the drives I see go tits up are huge and it is a pain in the arse to recover the data from them. Use only as large a drive as necessary/economical.

I'd much rather fill a 60 gig drive, pull it out and put in a new one that put tons and tons of data on a 250 gig drive and have it crap out. Often in data recovery, you have to copy the entire drive to restore the data. Bigger takes longer (to do everything - searches, etc)
 
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