RAID or Dedicated Drive for Audio Files?

  • Thread starter Thread starter 12Kevin
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12Kevin

Practical Cat
Let's say I've got a pair of 120g SATA hard drives in my DAW. Is is better to set them up as a RAID pair, or dedicate the second one to audio files?

Thanks, Wise People.

Kev
 
Kev,
With two disks you can do either RAID-0 (striping with no parity) OR RAID-1 (mirroring).

Striping without parity has several downsides, the steepest of which is that failure of one disk means loss of ALL data.

Mirroring is much safer but there is a cost in performance, as your PC must do two disk writes instead of one.

RAID-5 - striping with parity - is safe and fast, but it requires at least 3 disks.

So, if I were you, I'd use disk 2 for audio and do periodic backups of the audio data to disk 2.
 
Thanks! And if the guru is still in the mood:

Since you know about stripes and all that stuff, do you know if interleaving is still an issue with multiple audio tracks? When I began this DAW stuff 5 years ago, it was advised to not defrag the audio disk until a given project is bundled and stored. Or, to re-interleave them with a tool like the one from AnalogX. Or is this a nonissue with current read/write systems?
 
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