The lowdown on 2 Hard drives?

N

nommad

New member
Hello,
I'm putting together my first DAW after years of small time MIDI programs and 4 track recorders, and I was wondering if anyone could offer any solid advice on weather or not using 2 hard drives is really all that much better than 1 partitioned 20 GB Maxtor UDMA 7,200 RPM drive? I know this topic has been covered, but it seeems that everywhere I turn the big thing is using 2 hard drives. However, when I read software reviews, it seems the guys reviewing only list 1 drive as the machine THEY use. Is this because they want to review on an "avarage joe" machine, or is this what they really use? What are you guys using? Anyone having luck with 1 drive systems? I really only need to get around 12 - 16 tracks of audio with effects, but I want the tracks to be rock solid - any thoughts? Thanks! ~ Michael

p.s. - System will have an ABIT BF6 Motherboard, Pentium 3 650, & 256 MB RAM.
 
Two Drives:

No real performance gain while recording unless you are low on memory in which case having the swap file on a seperate drive from your audio drive can be a good idea. With regular audio recording, memory is seldomly an issue, however. 128MB is a good minimum to ensure smooth performance. 256MB doesn't hurt.

One benefit of course is that it's easier to reinstall operating systems and such in a multi-drive configuration. It might also seem that you'd be less likely to lose critical information, but this is not the case...your chance of a meltdown is the same.

Real benefits can be had by using a RAID controller. I believe Adaptec makes an IDE raid controller for around $100. A RAID0 configuration requires 2 identical drives
and a controller. You do not get more space, but you greatly improve performance. (That is, two 20GB drives in a RAID0 configuration gives you only 20GB of space, but boy it's going to run nicely).

One Drive, Multiple Partitions:

No performance gain at all...in fact there may be an extremely minimal degredation of performance due to multiple file tables.

The benefit is that your OS is seperate from your data. That means you wipe your windows partition and reinstall without worrying about your audio files....basically, it's very similar to having two drives.

Smaller partitions also reduce fragmentation issues. If you, for instance, use a 5GB partition for your current audio project. You can simply wipe that partition clean when you're finished and you are, for all intents and purposes, starting from scratch. No need to worry about defragging. Note that people with multiple drives also use partitioning techniques such as this, and it's not a *bad* idea at all.

With both of these configurations, the main benefit for most people, I think, is data seperation. For some reason people like to think in terms of "drives" instead of "folders." Fragmentation isn't really that big of a problem when working with large audio files, and defragging is only neccessary once every blue moon in my opinion. Plus, if you're recording multiple tracks at one time, you want to leave the files "interleved" which defragging ruins. Also, if you use a good operating system like NT4 or Windows 2000, reinstalling the OS is something that you'll rarely do, in which case running multiple partitions doesn't really help.

I have a single 7200RPM drive setup with a single FAT32 partition. I'm running Windows 2000 and there is no apparent OS performance degredation after 4 months now. I use my machine for many purposes besides recording and fragmentation has yet to become an issue. I typically work with 10-15 16bit tracks and 10-25 DX effects max in a session.

So, it's really going to depend on your requirements, and how you'd like to see your data.

One word of advice: always backup your audio. Regardless of how many partitions you make or how many drives you have, there is no substitute for having a "hard copy."

Slackmaster 2000
 
i should be smacked for this , but i think slack is incorrect , or im not reading what hes saying correctly. :)

"Real benefits can be had by using a RAID controller. I believe Adaptec makes an IDE raid controller for around $100. A RAID0 configuration requires 2 identical drives
and a controller. You do not get more space, but you greatly improve performance. (That is, two 20GB drives in a RAID0 configuration gives you only 20GB of space, but boy it's going to run nicely)."

im pretty sure that when you have 2 drives in RAID0 config that the speed as well as the size of the drive is doubled , tripled, or quadrupled depending on how many drives are in the array.. i have the promise fasttrak66 ide raid controller (also 100 bucks) with 2 10 gig 7200 rpm maxtor drives , in raid0 config which is seen in windows 98 and windows 2000 as one 20 gig drive.. i took this directly out of the fastrak66 manual :

the disk array capacity is equal to the number of drive members times the smallest member capacity. for example , one 1gb and three 1.2gb drives will form a 4gb (4 x 1gb) disk array.

smack me please..
ps.. with the promise fastrak66 its recomended that you use identical drives , but it will work regardless..

- eddie -
 
Yipes you're absolutely right! I was thinking redundancy, haha. Sorry. Sometimes I mix up the work stuff with the home stuff :)

Your available space in a RAID0 configuration will indeed be the sum of the space on all of the drives. AND your performance will improve considerably. It's really not a bad idea considering the costs of IDE drives!

You don't need no smackin, I've been butt-wrong about 10 times on the BBS in the past month. I've tried slowing down on posts to no avail. Would somebody tell me if I was getting stupider?

p.s. I also heard that you don't need identical drives but I've never tried this setup, and identical drives is the recommended procedure so it's all I can recommend...if you know what I mean :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
What happens if you want to add a third disk to your RAID0 array? Do you have to recreate the arraay and loose the data on the present disks or can you simply add the disk and reconfigure the array with the new disk?

Also, as far as I've gathered, a RAID0 with more than two disks will run even faster. A FastTrack66 (by Promise) with four 10GB disks would give you 40GB of kick-arse performance storage at the price of 10GB SCSI. Mmmm

/Ola
 
Slack...we don't think you are getting stupider. You just need a secretary to help you keep tabs on the immense load of data you carry around in your head. ;)
 
No Slack we dont think your getting stupider

In my oppinion Slack ,Gaffa and ola are the smartist Comp Techs on this board :D

I myself partition my drive into about six drives for organization....

and HATE FAT32 but if you must use it please use the /z:64 command after the Format command :)

see ya

Tony
 
I am so smart, I am so smart, S-M-R-T, I am so smart :D

Just glad that I can contribute in some way

Cheers

/Ola
 
I'm thinking about doing a 2 drive IDE RAID0 setup, but I don't think I would try 4. You lose any one of those 4 disks and you have lost everything on the other 3 as well. 2 disks I think I can justify in my head, but 4 would make me worry too much. :D

I'm not sure about RAID0 in adding a disk to an existing array, but knowing how it works, with the striping of data spread out across the discs, I wouldn't think you could keep the existing data. I remember reading something about recreating an array and still keeping the data in NT, but I don't know if that involved adding additional discs. Who knows, I could have dreamed that.
 
i just checked out a few things.. i didnt find any info in the faq about adding another drive , but im pretty sure you wouldnt lose everything on all the drives..

i also read that using 4 drives only triples the speed of the slowest drive in the array , not quadruples.. and yes , you can stripe an odd # of drives. (3)..

for my next computer building project im gonna stripe 4 20 gig 7200 rpm drives, and im just going to consistently back up to a tape back up drive..or possibly look into a dvd-ram drive..

and if your worried about drives crashing , you can mirror that array .. meaning you can have 2 sets of drives being striped with the same data. the trick here is hoping that only one drives goes in one array , and that the card doesnt crap out on ya.. in this situation though you can only use 2drives , since the fasttrak only supports 4 drives..

- eddie -
 
Hey All,

Just be aware that disk stiping without parity gives you no fault tolerance; if you lose one drive you've lost all your data. Because your striping the data across multiple drives it takes all the drives to reconstruct the data.

If you're in a production environment the best performance/fault tolerant combination is RAID 5 with duplexing.

Just more data from one carbon unit to another. :)

Fishkid
 
why raid 5 and not raid 0+1 ? im not exactly sure what raid 5 is , but i do know that raid 5 isnt supported by the promise card , although raid 0+1 is..

- eddie -
 
RAID5 is a way to secure data on a number of disks while only "wasting" the space of one of the disks. Checksums for all bits are written to the "wasted" disk and if one of the data disks is lost, the data on that disk can be calculated from the checksums and written to a new disk. There's a performance loss for this though so it's not really for us DAWers unless data integrity is more important than performance. A 4-disk RAID0 array for the recording and a RAID5 array for storage would be optimal but then we're not really talking homerecording anymore.

I'm not sure about the preformance of RAID0+1 (i.e. mirrored RAID0 where the read/write load is shared over several disks that in turn are mirrored.) Wouldn't the mirroring steal the performance gain from RAID0?

Well, maybe I should stay below seven disks anyway.

/Ola
 
I checked with some system configuration/hardware setup guys at the office and they said that RAID0+1 is the best for applications where you write big chunks of data while reading even more. (As is the normal DAW case). The reason, according to them, is that the controller card spreads the write load over two disks (RAID0) but also benefits from the mirroring (RAID1) as it can read from any of the two mirrored disks. The write performance will not be as good in a RAID0+1 as in a RAID0 as the data has to be mirrored but you'll have excellent read performance and you don't have to worry about loosing data due to hard disk crashes. The write performance is less critical than the read performance as you usually never write more than 8 tracks but can read many more in a big mixing project.

Anyone care to send me a FastTrak66 RAID controller card and four big disks so I can perform some tests and benchmarks?

/Ola
 
That's where the duplexing comes in: you're using mulitple controllers with their own onboard RAM to handle the I/O processes. That way you get the benefits of fault tolerance while minimizing performance hits.

I realize I'm drifting off into performance scenarios where data protection is paramount and squeezing every last bit of performance is also required. It's the systems engineer in me. This is really for environments that need 0% down time.

For the home studio person it's probably overkill. A couple of large, fast disks and good backup procedures will do the job.

Fishkid
 
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