sata vs ide for audio drive

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surfmaster

surfmaster

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im building a daw. i have one sata drive and one regular ide drive and i was wondering if it would be a better idea to have my sata drive be the os drive or the audio drive? i was thinking sata for audio but im not sure and thought maybe you guys knew more than me.
 
I would partition the SATA drive and put both on it.

Basically yes you definitely want your audio stuff on it but...
I have 2 SATA drives and an IDE drive. I got the IDE drive originally to recover the stuff on my hard drive when my OS died for some reason. Started with the idea that this time I could put my OS on the IDE drive. However after having had my OS on SATA previously, I could not get used to how much slower the OS ran on IDE. And if your OS is running slow, a lot of stuff connected to it is going to be to. I'm not sure by how much, but personally I couldn't deal with my OS being that slow at the time. The OS on my IDE drive is purely for emergency recovery, so I can still get to the data on the SATA drive in the event that my OS dies on me again.
 
so having both on the same drive would actually be better, even if a lot of people say its best to keep your drives separate? or do they mean having audio and os on the same partition. i'll try it out both ways and see how it works ive got a large enough sata drive (160 gigs) thanks a lot though!
 
It is better to keep your drives seperate for numerous reasons. Even though you can partition a drive & keep one side for OS & the other side for Audio, things can still get screwed up. I just had to wipe out & fix my friend's drive because he tried to partition a 3rd drive into a partition to test out windows vista, and now his hard drives' messed up, he lost all audio records etc. Luckly we keep back ups' of our data. It's also faster to have 2 drives. While your working in OS & your program on the first drive, and you decide to encode & save etc... windows doesn't have to jump back and forth in the drive saving data & encoding. It can just straight up do that on a second drive.
 
SATA is better. it's that simple. if you are planning on keeping both drives, are you going to have 2 separate drives, or are you thinking of a RAID setup for backup purposes??

if it's the first option, keep your smaller drive (no matter which one) for your OS and other things, and the larger drive for music.
 
The comparison/contrast is between SATA and PATA, just to get technical.

In general, we use our faster drives for digital audio. And, now that the price differences are negligible, it would be silly not to use SATA all around.

BUT - unless you have very large track-count needs, either SATA or PATA will do fine.
 
seeing as how this is my first time building a pc, i'm going to keep it simple and not worry about raid or anything. i'm just gonna have my os on the smaller, ide drive and use the sata for audio. thank you everyone for your help!
 
2 drive would be best. Both SATA if possible.

If not, I'd put the OS, apps and working folder on the SATA drive and use the IDE for archival and storage purposes. You can partition or not depending on your pref. I've done it both ways and with XP it doesn't make much difference.

The best route IMHO is to have a dual drive mirrored set for the OS and apps and a 3 drive RAID 5 set for storage. That's how I'm building my next DAW.
 
Surfmaster, IDE-OS and SATA-Audio files is what I'd do too. One other thing to consider... If I were you, depending on how big it is... I'd partition the IDE drive w/ C: 5-7 Gig where you'll put your OS and Programs/Apps. Then with the other side D: (what ever is left) 20Gig, 40 Gig ect... . This way you can make very quick backups of your songs (Audio Files). Just Copy and paste the Folder of the song your working on from E: SATA-Audio drive to D: IDE-Backup Partition This way if a drive goes down you have backups. AND if for some reason your Windows OS goes goofy you can Format the C: drive and reinstall Windows XP and your Apps w/ out earasing all your back ups.



Good Luck,
B.
 
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