Setting Up 2 Hard Drives

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whattaguy

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Okay, so I'm a newbie to this whole recording thing and wanted to know how to set up a second hard drive. I want to use XP on both drives.

Do I just install all my audio apps on my "D" drive and run everything from the same OS?...Does that make sense?

Or do I need to set up the computer so that I need to choose which hard drive or OS to run on from start up?...Set up a dual boot?

And how do I go about about doing either of these? The dual boot-two drive-audio thing is all new to me.

Thanks for all your help!
 
Installing a second hard drive is one of the easier upgrades you can do. Though if space it yous concern, replacing your existing hard drive with a bigger one is much simpler and i would advise that for a begginer. But if you want two here's the deal,

1 Find an empty drive bay in your computer, if you can leave some space between your new drive and existing one that would be ideal.

2. you should have two ide cables, big flat grey cables connected to your motherboard with two connectors on them. If you have one cd drive, one cable will probably go to it and the other will go to the hard drive. if this is the case set the jumper on the back of your new drive to slave and you old one to master. The jumper information should be printed right on the drive itself or read the manuel for more info.

3.Connect the very end of the hard drive ide cable to the master and the middle connector to the slave, plug in the 4 pin power cable and your set.

if you have two cd drives, there will only be one connector avaliable, set your new drive to slave and the first drive on that cable to master.

That should do it, In my computer it will show up as drive c: and then d: or soomthing like that. It is best to install all programs on the same drive as XP is installed and use the new drive for files and such only.

You would use a dual boot only if you wanted to run two different operating systems.

I hope this is coherant, I also wish i could spell.

-Angermeyer
 
If you're going to be using this new drive for audio work, you should have it on a different IDE channel than your current hard drive (ie, not sharing the same IDE cable). This will give you better performance under system load where you hit VM.
 
Good point, you also want to seperate your cd-rom from your burner if you have both.
 
Whether you dual-boot or not, I would suggest having your OS(s) and all applications on one drive, and use the second drive for recording onto, and short-term storage of audio files you are working with. You can also use your second drive to write back-ups of your main drive. Then back-up files, and audio recordings you are finished with, should be copied from your data drive to CDR and removed.
 
thanks for all you're replies...but you're talking to a guy who only knows office stuff and applications. all this is news to me.

RWhite,
when you say "and use the second drive for recording onto" what do you mean. do i run my programs on the first drive and save data to the second? or do i run and save onto the second drive?

i know this is very obvious to you knowledgeable guys, but this is like learning addition and subtraction for the first time to me...easy once you learn it but difficult to those who hadn't seen numbers before! thanks, again!

angermeyer,
thanks for your detailed explanation. i got the second drive in successfully, and my burner for the second bay.

elevate,
i will open up my computer, and see if i can put the aforementioned parts on separate cables.
 
What you want to do is have your OS and apps installed on one drive, and then use the other drive for your audio work. This means you're going to put your cdrw drive on the same chain as one of the hard drives. I don't think it matters which is slave and which is master, but you should but the cd burner on the chain with the drive you won't be burning data from. Say if your hard drives are C and D and your burner is E, and D and E are on the same chain, then you want to burn your cd's with data that's on C. This will let you burn at higher speeds than if they were on the same chain. Of course you can always move data for burning over to the other drive, so it's really up to you how you want to set it up.
 
You can run all your apps including OS on the primary master with the CDRW as the primary slave. Your second HD should be the secondary master. When your recording app tells you to create a folder for the project (as Nuendo does) create it on on the second drive and the app will find it. Also store all your mixdowns and any other audio on this drive. When you burn a CD, there will not be any IDE sharing conflicts since the audio you're using is on a different IDE channel than the CDRW. I don't see a reason to use dual boot as Windows will see both drives. Just put a shortcut for it on your desktop.

I hope this makes sense.
 
Elevate & Flatrock are both right on the money.

What I mean by "using the second drive for recording" is simply this: Your applications, including music apps, have to be installed to a hard drive. You want them to be installed on your system drive, a.k.a. C: drive. But you can configure your audio apps to actually write their data to your second hard drive ( D: ) So while you are recording the audio data is being writen to D:

The reason to seperate out the drives is based on how IDE controllers work. Your computer has two of them, referred to as the Primary and Secondary. Each contoller can support two IDE devices, which are called a Master and a Slave. An IDE device such as a hard drive can either be writing or reading. However IDE controllers don't do a great job of writing and reading at the same time - this is something that SCSI controllers do much better. So the best way to help you computers IDE controllers work well is to seperate out your devices, like so -

Primary Master - You C: drive, with the OS and applications
Primary Slave - A CDR drive
Secondary Master - A big, fast hard drive to record your music to.
Secondary Slave - a CD-ROM, or DVD, or nothing at all.

By dividing it up like this, whether you are working at recording, duping a CD (from your second CD-ROM to CDR), or backing up your data to CDR, each of your Primary and Secondary controllers will be either reading or writing, but not trying to do both at the same time.
 
If you have a relatively fast hard drive as your primary master (ex: UDMA 133), and a CD-RW (that is only UDMA 33 at best) on the primary slave, then that prevents the master hdd from operating any better than UDMA 33. This little known fact is rarely mentioned.
 
That statement is no longer correct. The original first generation IDE CD-ROM drives did have that problem. But any of the newer ATAPI-compatible drives do not.
 
wow really? so, how about if I have my UDMA 33 Yamaha CD-RW on the same secondary IDE bus as my audio drive, which is a UDMA 133? Would it matter which was master/slave? I haven't heard of any testing that supports having them both on the same IDE bus.
~Dave
 
It should not matter, although I would set the hard drive as the master. Of course you do have to be using one of the new high-density (80 wire) IDE cables, otherwise your hard drive will indeed run slower. But with the right cable your HD and CDR should get along fine.
 
For some reason, the Intel Ultra ATA Companion utility is reporting a 40 conductor ribbon on the secondary, although I'm using an 80 conductor one.

Anyhow, wouldn't there still be data flowing in both directions (on the secondary IDE bus) when I'm burning a CD (on the secondary) from audio tracks which are on the audio disk (also on the secondary)?

Also, for the most part, wouldn't most of the application (Sonar, Cubase, etc.) be in memory, thus eliminating the need for a clear IDE bus to and from the local system hard drive?

I'll quickly admit that my experience in digital recording is very minimal at this point. In time, I'll probably try the audio track hard drive on each of the 2 busses, just to see if it really makes a noticable difference. I guess what I getting at is, does it really matter, or we succumbing to analysis paralysis?

ps, I'll be away from the forum for a few days.
Dave
 
And now for something completely different...

I built the Roll Your Own Thunderbird as laid out by Procrec.com. This is an audio only machine with no games/internet/excel or anything. It is admittedly second class nowadays with the new Pentium Northwoods/DDR ram and RAID cards that so many people seem to be using successfully-BUT-it is a solid machine that suits my needs (that's always the key ain't it?). Here's the layout for 3 HDDs and CDRW:

Disc One-20 gig Maxtor-IDE channel 0 Master-3 partitions: OS, Apps, Other (MP3s)

Disc Two-60 gig Maxtor-IDE channel 0 Slave-2 partitions: Working audio data, backups.

CDRW-Yamaha-IDE channel 1-Master

Disc Three-60 gig Maxtor-IDE channel 1 Slave-2 partitions: Backups, backups.

I'm a bit anal about backups but this is a new machine and I'm new to digital recording so I have abundant disc space. I'll consolidate things a bit as I start to fill the drives. At any rate I have no issues recording multiple tracks, saving files or burning cds.

lou
 
Did you spell the website correctly?
Procrec.com
I could not bring it up.
I too have my machine set up for 3 drives, configured similarly to yours, except that the hdd on channel 1 slave is removable. Not only is it for backups, but I use in to transfer updates, drivers, downloads, etc. from my internet/utility machine to the dedicated digital audio machine. There is no modem on my DAW. For example, if you were to send me a Cakewalk .wrk file, I would download it to this machine, pull the hdd and insert in the dock bay on the DAW, then either work with it from the hdd, or transfer the file to the working audio drive. My only problem with this, is that I was unable to transfer the w2k service pack, and as of yet, haven't figured out a workaround.
dave
 
Ooops! Sorry Dave. That is Prorec.com as in Pro Recording. The only difference between my system and the RYO is that they make use of removable drive bays, like you, whereas mine are fixed. I too rely on sneaker-net to transfer files - I just use cds. I'm using 98se so I can't help you with the service pack workaround. Sorry 'bout the typo!
lou
 
tried the setup you guys suggested and...my computer booted up fine and everthing seems to be running okay. haven't tried laying down tracks yet, but thanks for all of your help, buddy ol' pals!
 
RWhite said:

Primary Master - You C: drive, with the OS and applications
Primary Slave - A CDR drive
Secondary Master - A big, fast hard drive to record your music to.
Secondary Slave - a CD-ROM, or DVD, or nothing at all.

By dividing it up like this, whether you are working at recording, duping a CD (from your second CD-ROM to CDR), or backing up your data to CDR, each of your Primary and Secondary controllers will be either reading or writing, but not trying to do both at the same time.
Click to expand...

Hi guys,

I'm about to get into recording, and i'm just deciding on the hard drive configuration for my new PC. The config that RWhite describes above looks like what I need. However, I also want to use the PC for Internet and other non-Audio related stuff. I don't want to do this on the audio PC so I was thinking of having the C: boot drive (that has the OS and audio apps) in a removable cradle that I can swap with another drive that has an OS that I will use for the internet and other apps. I'll probably have windows 2000 as the OS on both drives.

Is this possible, and does anyone use this sort of setup?

Thanks,

Simmo.
 
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