What Drive Should You Put Samples On?

[dachay2tnr]

It is pretty much conventional wisdom that in using Sonar you should put the application itself on your OS drive, and your audio files on a second, separate HDD.

This got me to thinking. Currently I keep my Sound Fonts and other samples housed on my OS drive. Would it make more sense to put them on the same drive as the recorded audio? I'm thinking the same logic would apply to samples as would recorded audio.

What do you guys do? Why?

 

[moskus]

Would it make more sense to put them on the same drive as the recorded audio?

Yes, of course it would because that's what I do.

Scenario: You urgently have to reformat because Windows crashed once and for all. What happens to your beautifully collected sample library? Well, it may get lost if you forget to copy it over.

PLUS, it would be an advantage to have your streaming samples on the same drive as your audio for just the same reasons.

 

[AlChuck]

The main reason to put audio data on its own dedicated drive -- so that the OS and the application don't have to hit the disk for DLLs and such while you are recording -- has been pretty minimized by now with modern fast and HUGE drives...

That said, Sound Fonts are typically loaded into memory, at least when using a Sound Font-capable soundcard like an SB Live. So there is no hard drive access occuring with them while you are recording or playing. (I'm not sure what typical softsynth samplers that load sounds do -- though I know the Gigasampler stuff streams from disk in order to avoid limitations of sample size and typical user system RAM sizes).

There are some benefits as moskus described in the case of a system crash, but you should be backing up your stuff anyway, so it should be irrelevant where you keep your sounds. (I mean, it's just as likely in my experience that any hard drive will go belly up, whether it's a boot drive or something else.)

I often see people in these and other forums talking about how they need to reformat and reinstall Windows like it's a normal and regular part of using a computer. What's up with that? All I can imagine is that these folks are doing stuff like deleting system files or something until the whole OS becomes so unstable it can't function. In over ten years of using Windows machines on a dialy basis both at work and at home, I have never had to reformat and re-install Windows on any machine -- except when a hard drive has physically died...

 

[dachay2tnr]

Yeah, I was specifically thinking of DXi Soft Synths, rather than an SB Card.

Currently I use Kompakt, Edirol VSC, and Live Synth Pro. Kompakt does have a "direct from disk" feature which streams the samples from the hard drive. That's what actually got me to thinking about this. Streaming samples from an hdd would seem to be to be not much different than accessing wave files. Therefore, the logic would seem to be to treat them the same as you do wave files.

I'm not sure how Edirol and LSP work. They might load the samples into memory.

Anyway, I was just curious if anyone had given this any thought - since I've never seen it addressed anywhere that I can recall.

Moskus, I was more interested in performance than data security, and as AlChuck said, your secondary drive can die just as easily as your primary drive.

 

[James Argo]

I always put samples on the other drive (eg. audio drive). And if you realy concern about this issue, then you might want to check also that both HD should NOT connect to the same IDE cable.

IDE 1 --> HD 1 (OS) --> Optional drive (CDR, DVD)
IDE 2 --> HD 2 (Audio) --> Optional drive (CDR, DVD)

Optional drives are... well... optional...

And it's also better to set your picture cache folder into the same drive as your OS/SONAR.


Jaymz

 

[Tabnak]

I have a third, specific hdd for samples, just for that reason. I wondered too, if it would make any sense to have them on the audio-hdd, but I used to store them on the OS-drive, because I wanted to keep the read/write heads of the audio-hdd free from anything but recording audio, not reading samples. I'm not sure whether this is overkill, but I wanted to make sure. And since Gb's are relatively cheap.....

tabnak