Revamping a PC for a pal

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punkin

punkin

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A friend of mine has an older but capable PC. He asked me to kick it up a notch. The biggest limitation was the size of his hard drives and it was a little light on RAM.

I added fresh DDR memory to the tune of 1 GB and now the hard drives. The mobo is capable of SATA150 so I put in one new 250 GB SATA with (16 MB memory) hard drive and kept the two IDE Ultra's. Forgot to mention, both the 80 GB drives have 8 MB memory. Not junk by any stretch but I'm trying to maximize his performance.

Here's where I am. He's got XP running on one of the IDE's. I'm not sure where the best bang in terms of performance will be. Keep the OS running on the IDE and record to the SATA drive or, move the OS over to the SATA and record to the IDE. I'm even wondering if it will make a difference because of some of the theoretical limitations I've read about regarding the earlier MOBO's and SATA bandwidth.

BTW...all the drives are 7200 rpms. What do ya think?
 
If it was me, I'd just benchmark each drive (there are plenty of free tools available) and work from there. Don't hypothesise about which drive is the quickest, do some real world benchmarks.

From there, install the OS on the slower drive and use the fastest drive for the recording and temp stuff for your DAW.

The general consensus I've seen is that seek time is the most important stat you're interested in, but real life tests are the best thing you can do.

My board has one of the early SATA controllers and I can easily work on a 30 track project in Reaper.

Don't forget the CPU-- If you don't have a card to offload the effects on to, the CPU can be more important, since even shit SATA disks are more than enough for recording, but you can never have a quick enough CPU!

Hope this helps :)
 
IDK, I would probably put the OS into the faster drive to be able to run things more smoothly. In the past ALL of use have used slower than SATA150 drives for recording 60 tracks or something, however those are smaller IDE drives and we tend to have the Audio drives with more space. So all in all, leave the audio drive SATA and the 80 host the OS.
 
Thanks all,

The CPU is a 3.0 GHz Pentium, all three drives are WD. I can already tell which of the drives is fastest...there's a night and day difference...the SATA drive easily wins out.

So I guess I'll go with the plan and the easier thing to do and that is use the SATA for the audio recording.
 
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