TWO hard drives - splitting the load

  • Thread starter Thread starter trogdor
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mgraffeo is right about keeping drives as empty as possible, as performance slows when you start to fill up space. I've seen many charts showing transfer speed decrease as free disk space decreases.

I run a stripe set IDE RAID on two of my 30gig 7200rpm WD ATA100 HDD's, and the benchmark tests have shown great performance. It almost doubled the read/write speed! I did find that with my new 8MB cache 80gig WD 7200rpm ATA100 HDD that it is quite close to the RAID pair though - at least in read speed. I prefer the 8mb cache drive for audio even though it's slightly slower than the RAID pair b/c the risk of drive failure is half of that of the double drive setup.

BTW - you don't really need SCSI. Just do your homework on web hard drive speed tests and you'll find many IDE drives are faster than many SCSI drives.

One more note - when you format the disk for audio, use large cluster sizes, since audio files tend to be large ... the rational is that it's faster to carry ten big boxes than 100 small boxes, or something like that.

Word.
 
Just for reference...

1.4Ghz AMD, 640MB ram, Cubase SX, Delta 1010, Win2K

OS and applications on 15gig partition of 7200rpm 80gig
65 gig partition empty (I don't know what I'm using this for yet)
Audio files on 7200rpm 30 gig
Backup files on 7200rpm 80 gig
Working drive (MP3s, downloads, etc...) 7200RPM 30 gig

24 stereo tracks, 14 different effects.

During playback, the performance meter for the CPU was about 20%. Disk activity was about 80 - 90%. I'm going to assume that's about the max for my setup, although I still have an onboard raid controller that I'm not using. If I were to stripe some drives together, I should be able to almost double the track limit.

At the very least, you need 2 drives. OS on one and audio on another. I had the option to go SCSI, but the price was too much for me. Right now, IDE is about $1 per gig all the way up to 180 gig.

Something else to consider is IDE channels. Most motherboards have 3 connectors for drives. The small one is the floppy, you can ignore that one until you need to dig up some obsolete driver disk or something. The other 2 are the IDE channels. Since most of us have at least 1 CD-ROM or DVD or CD-RW, that gets connected to channel 2 along with your Audio drive. the OS drive gets plugged into channel 1. The reason for this is that the IDE cable can only transfer so much data at one time. When burning a CD, you need to stream data from the OS drive to the CD burner. Out on channel 1, in on channel 2. When you're recording, it's the same thing. The processor needs to access the OS drive and the audio drive at the same time. Keeping them on seperate channels effectivly doubles the data flow. If you're doing a backup of our audio files to CD, you might see a performance decrease this way, but then again, it's not as critical.

I think the best combination is RAID 10. In English, that means 4 drives (all the same size and speed). 2 of those drives get striped into 1 drive (the data is split between them allowing the computer to write data twice as fast). The other 2 drives are treated the same way but copies the first set bit for bit (it's called mirroring). You get the speed advantages (x2) and the rundancy at the same time. If a drive fails, you simply replace that drive and rebuild the array. If you include the price of the RAID controller card ($50), the whole thing costs less than $400 and gives you 160 gig (assuming you're using 80 gig drives) of redundant storage that's as fast or faster than you're average SCSI drive.
 
Hi there

Well maybe this will help...

I have an AMD Duron 700mgh, 384 mb sd ram, a Via KT 133 based chipset mobo running Win98se and CWGTPro, using a M-Audio Delta 44 soundcard. It runs extremely well most of the time (just enough dropouts to keep me tweaking), doing digital audio, 16/44.1.

The best thing that I’ve ever done on this system was to install a second hdd, for audio data only (Maxtor 7200 rpm, 8mb cache). This decreased the percentage of time the hdd spent looking for my .wav data by incredible amounts. Also, I’ve heard it is advantageous (and seems to have made a difference with my particular system) to put swap files on the drive with your program data (and don’t forget to set the size of your swap files to a fixed size—approximately twice the size of your physical memory/ram)...

Now on newer systems...I dunno if it would make a difference...

Tom
 
Welcome to the board, Thom IV :)
Nice info you brought...

Doug Quance said:
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.
Click to expand...

I agree with you, Doug Q... You'll noticed the differences when you mix 'em.
 
Hawking--what you're saying makes perfect sense to me, as far as the IDE channels and how to connect the drives. In fact that is exactly how I've got mine set up...

That being said--some folks have argued that having my UDMA 66 (slow transfer) CDrom drive on the same IDE channel as one of my UDMA 133 (fast transfer) hd will slow the transfer rate of that entire IDE channel down. They argue that you should have all your fast transfer devices on one IDE channel and all your slow transfer devices on the other.

Any thoughts on this?

Do they make UDMA 133 CDrom drives? I've never heard of these puppies if they do.

Tom

PS What I really need is a mobo with 3 IDE drives (excluding the floppy)...
 
Thom IV said:
That being said--some folks have argued that having my UDMA 66 (slow transfer) CDrom drive on the same IDE channel as one of my UDMA 133 (fast transfer) hd will slow the transfer rate of that entire IDE channel down. They argue that you should have all your fast transfer devices on one IDE channel and all your slow transfer devices on the other.

Any thoughts on this?

Do they make UDMA 133 CDrom drives? I've never heard of these puppies if they do.

Tom

PS What I really need is a mobo with 3 IDE drives (excluding the floppy)...
Click to expand...

I haven't heard about the slower device slowing down the whole channel, although I woudn't deny it if I saw some benchmark results.

I haven't heard of UDMA 133 CDrom drives either. I know mine certainly aren't.

My motherboard (ASUS A7V-133) has 4 IDE channels. The 2 standard channels are UDMA66 I think . That's where My operating system and software go. Then there's 2 more channels (UDMA100). That's where my audio goes. All of the other drives I have don't really matter where they are. They're just for storage and backups. With 4 IDE channels I can connect 2 devices to each channel (master and slave). That's 8 devices. My next upgrade is to use the 2 UDMA100 channels with the built in RAID controller (running RAID 0). I have all of the peices to do it, I just haven't actually done it yet. This should give be almost double the throughput. If you need more IDE channels, go get yourself a $30 raid controller. It will use an extra PCI slot, but it will give a minimum of 2 (usually 4) more drives. You can setup the array in various ways depending on the controller, although striping is the best for max throughput. Just make sure your power supply is up to the task.
 
You just need 2 IDE HDs and a raid card. Run raid0. Works like a charm.
 
Yeah

I've thought about the whole 'RAID thang'. I hear it makes a difference.

I never realized it would create extra IDE busses, nor did realize that it was relatively inexpensive...I may actually be able to justify something like that for my little home studio setup.

Hmmmmm....I think I will learn more about this...

Thanks for the tip.
Tom
 
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