TWO hard drives - splitting the load

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trogdor

trogdor

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I'm building a pc and was debating getting an 80gig 7200 HD or 2 smaller drives to put my OS etc. on one and audio on the other...

people using a separate drive for audio:

does two drives give you significantly better performance with audio recording?

Do you use your audio hard drive strictly for audio files or does it further enhance the performance to put your recording software on it as well?

thanks, jon
 
I haven't bought a second drive yet, but I'm planning to. I was going to put my audio and video editing software on one and all the data (audio/video files) on the other. That way one disk spins for software and the other for data, reducing contention for the disks.
 
Yea that seems to be the advantage.

Mainly what i was curious about is if it would be beneficial to put your audio software on the extra drive with the audio as well...because I would think that with the recording software isolated from the OS sofware and other crap it would run more smoothly...

I could be wrong...

anybody?
 
with a new computer the file transfers between motherboard and harddrive are sooo fast there really is no advantage.

The advantage does come, however, when your OS goes down the crapper. If you have them on seperate HDD's you can redo one with out having to back up to another.
 
trogdor said:
Yea that seems to be the advantage.

Mainly what i was curious about is if it would be beneficial to put your audio software on the extra drive with the audio as well...because I would think that with the recording software isolated from the OS sofware and other crap it would run more smoothly...

I could be wrong...

anybody?
Click to expand...
Im not so sure that you can install the recording program on a HD without an OS on it as well, but I could be wrong. Primarily, the second HD is for audio only{no programs} I dont think it would improve the performance of the program itself to have it on the audio HD.
 
you can install the software anywhere you want...i does not matter which HDD your OS is on
 
Just for your info

I use 3 hard drives.

One for the OS (20 gig, WIndows XP professional, faster transfer the better)

One for the Temp directories of the OS (20 Gig, fastest transfer would be good here also)

Third for all music files (80 gig, UDMA 100)

There are some really fast 8mb cache from WD and Maxtor nowdays for the music drive.

There is a substantial diference in using a second drive for the temp(AKA swap files) and turn options to best performance (Advanced Properties of My Computer)
 
Though most people recommend having the OS and recording software on one drive, and another for the audio - I have yet to see it make a difference.

I have my system set up this way. But I've run some unscientific tests putting audio on the system drive, internal audio drive, and external firewire drive. I find the results to be the same.
 
Timanator said:
Just for your info

I use 3 hard drives.

One for the OS (20 gig, WIndows XP professional, faster transfer the better)

One for the Temp directories of the OS (20 Gig, fastest transfer would be good here also)

Third for all music files (80 gig, UDMA 100)

There are some really fast 8mb cache from WD and Maxtor nowdays for the music drive.

There is a substantial diference in using a second drive for the temp(AKA swap files) and turn options to best performance (Advanced Properties of My Computer)
Click to expand...


Personally I think a separate drive just for temp directories is overkill. You'd be better off with extra RAM if you're that worried about swapfiles.
 
2 HDs / Multiple partitions

HD 1: 40 gigs

C: / 10 gigs - OS and software
D: / 10 gigs - OS and software for audio
E: / 20 gigs - temp backup! (after each recording session, I backup the project)

HD 2: 80 gigs

F: / 20 gigs - misc. data
G: / 60 gigs - audio files (recording)
 
I haven't tested this sort of thing, and don't have any first hand experience with it, but from a geek pint of view I don't see a big advantage other than orginization. If you have enough memory your OS drive shouldn't be stressed due to program execution. The main reason for multiple harddrive is dedicted swap drive, but I'd rather have a gig of actual memory.

That being said, it seems that most audio apps are built around streaming to and from the harddrive, so having a dedicated audio drive should at least minimize the odd random glitch.

It you are running gigastudio or something else so you have two apps using the drive at the same time, it would seem to make sense to split the load across two harddrives.

Even so, I'd lean towards getting the deadliest harddrive money can buy, quiet fast and stable.
 
Doug H said:


Even so, I'd lean towards getting the deadliest harddrive money can buy, quiet fast and stable.
Click to expand...

Tottally true, in IDE form, this is prob the current 8 mb Cache model of the WD or Maxtor drives.
 
My guess is that it will depend upon what you are recording.

If you're recording two-track stuff, it probably won't make a difference.

But if you're getting into some serious tracking... a separate drive for the audio files should be preferable.

If you're getting really serious... one drive for the OS and program, one drive for the project, and a third drive for the mixed down output would be best.
 
I agree with Doug Q as far as keeping finished files separate from your project files. The OS and Audio Software only really needs about 10 GB space, and that's leaves breathing room. So you could easily partition a 40 GB drive, and have another larger, say, 80 GB drive to keep audio data on. You might also want to consider an external firewire drive for audio data/backups as well.
 
IMO its a minor trade-off either way. If you need serious tracking capability get SCSI or IDE RAID.
 
Call it overkill but I use 2 18gig 10K rpm ultra160 scsi drives(stripe set) for my audio. I have already had over 40 tracks of 24/48 playing and not so much as a hicup.
 
Doug Q is right, it's all about throughput.

SCSI was the choice because it's HD's spin at 10k RPM. The faster a HD spins, the shorter the seek time, and therefore, the easier the data is to access, and write.

With 7200 RPM IDE drives, most folks can handle audio on their drives. But when the same drive is being accessed for system/program info and for LARGE audio files, you can run into problems, especially at high bit rate/sampling frequency.

The other argument is that the seek time performance of a hard drive significantly decreases when the drive becomes more than half full. With a drive dedicated to audio files, you can keep the drive half full or less, and optimize the performance of the drive. This is also the rationale for defragmenting early and often. I cannot say for a fact that it does matter, but the theoretical argument makes a lot of sense to me.

I run two HD's; one for system/program, and one solely for audio (.wav) files. I bought the 2nd HD in a troubleshooting mode (it was cheap!). I never had any problems with drive throughput before, and I don't have any problems now. Likely, for most of the stuff folks are doing, one HD will be fine, especially if you archive old projects off the disk. But for those power users who are running 16 tracks of 24/96 audio, you can bet you're going to need a 2nd HD, and you're probably wanting to get SCSI and start running a RAID array.

But I digress...

-mg
 
Looks like 10,000 rpm drives will be available in serial ATA. Here's a link to a Western Digital drive:

http://store.yahoo.com/upsource/67821.html

Some folks are not convinced with serial-ATA yet. It's in the early stages. Just thought you might want to check it out. Could be a way to get the speed without going SCSI.
 
Not sure why people don't want to use scsi. It's not nearly as expensive as it was a few years ago. I just seen 18gig scsi drives for $30 at tigerdirect.
 
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