Quit Hitting my Hard Drive!!!

[BlindCowboy]

I just completed my Win2000 machine. I am now "Optomizing" it for the best audio performance. One issue I need advice on though:

AMD 2600+ 333mhz
ASUS A7N8X-X
MATROX 450 DUAL MONITOR
ECHO MIA (WDM)
512 DDR Non-ECC
MAXTOR 40GIG 7200
CUBASE VST/32 5.0 R4

I have my drive partitioned 5/30. 5 side is loaded programs and 30 side is audio work only. Drive is formatted NTFS. Last night I recorded 4 stereo tracks w/ a basic reverb VST plugin as a send effect and noticed in the performance meter that the disk was ramping up to ~40%. Recordings were Truetape 32.

I was wanting 16 - 24 stereo tracks, which would be 32 - 48 mono. Is this not possible, or do I still have something (a buffer?) configured incorrectly?

(If your using cubase, what are your channel buffer and memory allocation settings?)

Is there an extensive noticable benefit of running two hard drives in a system as far as performance?

This question spans hardware and Software, so I'll post it in the Cubase forum as well.

Thanks again for any help,

Blind Cowboy...

 

[TexRoadkill]

Is there an extensive noticable benefit of running two hard drives in a system as far as performance?

Very much so. Get another 7200RPM drive and put it on it's own IDE port. Another 512mb of ram wouldn't hurt either.

You are probably overusing stereo tracks. Unless you are recording true stereo sources you are just wasting tracks.

Win2000 isn't that great of an OS for audio work. You might want to use 98SE or XP depending on what your software and hardware drivers will work with.

 

[BlindCowboy]

Hey Tex.

Do you stripe your drives (Raid1) or run straight EIDE w/ software on one and songlist on the second?

Yes. I am overusing Stereo tracks. Intentionally. It's a new system and I want to see where my limitations are. Once i'm satisfied with the limitation of stereo tracks, I'll nail a bunch of VSTs to them to see how much I can stack on. Then Mono tracks. etc...

As to the 2000 issue. 2000 is running on the same platform (essentially) as the XP core. Both, performance wise, are heads and tails over 98SE, which is what I came from.

Many of 2000's audio issues were in the install/SP1/and SP2. (As i'm learning recently) SP3 and SP4 resolved many of these issues to give the functionality of 2000 with the audio reliability of XP.

I've actually got both 2000 pro (that I loaded) and XP home. So, if issues do get too hairy w/ 2000, I have the opportunity to jump it up to XP. If that happens, I'll put a big sticker on the computer that says, "TEX TOLD ME TO, AND I DIDN'T LISTEN".

Thanks alot for the info on the disks..

Blind Cowboy...

 

[TexRoadkill]

I always just put the drives on seperate IDE ports and didn't bother with RAID. RAID is cool if you want redundancy but I'm not sure that it's actually faster unless you are using two drives for media (where each gets half the data, RAID 2?) and another for software. The main thing is not to bottleneck the throughput of the media drive(s) with other tasks.

I don't know about the newer 2000 service packs. I never liked 2000 because it didn't handle graphics as well. Since I switched to an HDR system for multitracking I only use computers for burning CD/DVDs, games and porn.

 

[Sangram]

For most typical use, RAID 0 has no benefits over two drives. Specially for audio. Two drives will almost always be better.

I have my OS and storage on two separate 120 GB drives.

The fact that you are hitting the disk a lot is indicating low memory and not just diskpace. You should customise XP a bit so it has a fixed swapfile, and thus does not hit the disk.

For a 1GB memory size two swapfiles of 256MB each on the two disks will suffice. XP will write to the swapfile on the disk that is less busy. When you can, you should have temp space on both drives, and storage on both drives as well.

XP has a lot of 'ware' that is not needed, specially in audio PCs. 2000 SP4 is stable, but runs very slowly. As does XP with SP1. For audio one of the best OS seems to be XP without any service packs, and no updates at all. Stripped down to the barebone, with no fancy eye candy, it's not a bad OS at all 98SE will be a bit faster, but will be a little buggy as well.