question regarding harddrives and soundcards

[jim.yojimbo]

Hi, I'm new here. I didn't know whether to put this in Newbies or here - if i'm wrong, let me know and I'll move it.

I'm using Cubase SX on a 512mb RAM, Athlon TBird 1.3gHZ PC. I am planning on getting a new sound card soon - I seem to remember the MAudio Delta / Audiophile 2496 was recommended as a "cheap" but good quality ASIO card for low latencies - is this still the general opinion round here.

I am also out of necessity going to have to get an extra harddrive, perhaps a 120GB - meaning I can wipe my current 60Gig one and use it as a spare/slave. Now, a friend of mine has a setup that includes a Fostex digital recorder plus his PC - he uses the Fostex to record realtime instruments, then copies this over to the PC - Obviously this means that the PC doesn't have to take the strain of recording and playing simultaneously - at least I presume so.

This would be a pricey setup! However, if I used my new 120GB harddrive for system files, and the 60GB drive for audio only, would the system strain be reduced so there wouldn't be much of a problem with simultaneous playback and recording. If so, would you use the "audio drive" for recording only, and copy playback files over to the "system driv", or keep ALL audio, playback and recording, on the "audio drive". Or is the separate digital recorder idea the best option?

Sorry, I know the above seems a little confusing in the wording I have used, but hope someone can help out.

Cheers

Jim

 

[AlChuck]

First off, why would you use the bigger drive for system files and the smaller drive for data files? That's kind of backwards.

Secondly, recording the tracks on the Fostex and then transferring them to the PC does nothing to reduce any "strain" on the computer unless all he's doing is recording a stereo mix onto the PC for the purpose of burning CDs, etc.

As far as "strain" goes, any reasonably fast, reasonably current machine is capable of playing back and simultaneously recording many tracks. The size of your hard drives has nothing to do with as long as there's plenty of free space on the data drive. The main factors in how well the computer will work are (a) speed of the front-side bus, (b) speed and type of the hard drive(s) and hard drive controller (UDMA 66 and up, or SCSI, or, I guess, the new SATA types), and (c) proper configuration for audio recording.