will a 10,000rpm hard drive work better?

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greggybud

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I’m preparing to have a new PC built for digital audio recording only. I have a few questions.

I still use VST32 and dont see the need to go to SX. I like the way the midi functions work in VST32 and I’m happy with the sound quality. I would probably go to Nuendo before SX if I had to change.

With a new PC I want more stereo audio tracks to play at the same time. I also want more VST instruments and plugs such as Waves and SIR running too. A lot of what I use is CPU intensive. With that in mind could anyone answer the following....

1. Has anyone had any positive or negative experience with www.pcaudiolabs.com ?

2. Would a 10,000 rpm hard drive work more efficiently with VST32 or SX than a 7,000rpm? Size has never been an issue but I'm wondering about speed?

3. At the above-mentioned site RAM simply doubles proportionately with cost. 1GB DDR400 costs 200.00 and 2GBs will cost 400.00. Considering I use VST32 with Wavelab with Waves products plus, SIR, and VST instruments such as Reaktor, FM7, Albino etc...will I notice a difference between 1GB vs. 2GB?

4. I’m considering going to the Matrox P750 triple head VGA that costs 245.00. Dual monitors has become too crowded these days. Has anyone had any experience with 3 monitors?
 
I've done 3 monitors before but not with music stuff. It works just like 2 monitors if you have a large desk.
Dunno about that company. I'm sure they make decent stuff just depends on the premium over a mainstream one or a built it your self. I've always built daw stuff for me and my freinds. If I was building another DAW, I'd still go with a Seagate Baracuda 8MB cache 7200 RPM drive. I have one and I;m pretty sure there's nothing out there that has a better balance of speed and low noise. These things make almost no noise... If you still need more speed for some reason, I'd probably go with a pair of Seagate Baracuda 8mb 7200 drives in raid-0. I bet 2 of them will still be much quieter than 1 10,000 rpm drive, and 2 of them will be very fast.
Personally I don't think it's worth going to anything over 1 GB unless you have money to burn. Extra memory isn't gonna help all that much unless you are running so many apps, you're file swapping. I don't think plugins are memory intensive so much as they are CPU intensive.
I guess I'd put as much of your money towards CPU power if you plan on using dozens of plugins. Even a regular 7200 RPM drive and 1 GB of memory will handle far more tracks than you might think...
 
hmmm ... 10,000 RPM will give you quicker response times but i've found 7200 to be more than adequate. the other thing to consider is that a faster spin means higher wear and an increased chance of failure. my take is that if you really want the speed then good, but otherwise you can get more for less at 7200!

not sure you'll notice a difference between 1Gb and 2Gb of RAM either. the thing is that music is not that intensive a data stream. i'm crap at maths but i guess the highest rate you will have is:

24bit resolution * 96,000 samples per second = 2304000 bits/sec,

if 8 bits = 1 byte then the stream is = 288000 bytes/sec

which (/1024) = 281 kilobytes/sec. When you consider your hard disks can transfer consistently above 20 MB/s (and in bursts, much higher) it seems your computer is going to be well capable of keeping up with dozens of these streams (channels of audio) at once. it takes a lot of these to fill up a gigabyte of temporary space (i.e. memory) so you may find with 2Gb that your software never actually requires all of that memory (or even 100% of your processor time, come to that).

if anyone notices mistakes in my maths, fill me in - i'm tired!!
 
On some web site they say 24 bit 44.1 = 7.938 MB per minute. Not really sure how to do the math, but checking the difference between 16 bit 44.1 and 16 bit 48, I would assume the data size doubles when you double the sampling rate. That would mean 24 bit at 96 KHz would be 15.88 MB a minute per track or ~265 KB a second per track.
Seagate claims the baracuda V can do at least 27-44 Mbit/sec sustained on a new system. Doing a little grey area math and taking into account that the burst rate of 8mb cache will cancel access latencies associated with accessing miltiple files, I'll say 5 MB/sec on a machine greater that 2.5 GHz. (or 2700+ speeds)

That's still 20 tracks at 24 bit 96 Khz, and you can do more tracks than that since you probably won't have 20 tracks playing all the way through an entire song.
 
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my maths said 288 KB/sec, yours said 265 KB/sec. with margins like that, we must be right! i agree with your post, it's what i was trying to say in mine!
 
Thanks for the responses. So a 10,000rpm drive wont increase performance and I should be looking out for a Seagate.
 
you'll get quicker response times (we were talking about bandwidth) but i don't reckon it'll make much difference to be honest, because audio is well within the capabilities of a modernish PC. if you want it, though, do get it!

as for brands of hard-disk, i have used maxtor and seagate for the last five years and they've all been more quiet than my computer fans (i.e. i wouldn't pay extra for a quieter one) and none has had any problems thus far!
 
greggybud said:
Thanks for the responses. So a 10,000rpm drive wont increase performance and I should be looking out for a Seagate.
Click to expand...

It will increase performance, but the trade off is they cost alot more per MB than an 8mb cached 7200 rpm drive and are louder. For the money, a 8mb cached 7200 rpm drive will work nicely for most stuff. If you need more speed it's more cost effective to grab another Baracuda and do a raid-0.

Here's an article I found that actually compares these drives. Kinda interesting....

Raptor vs Caviar vs Baracuda
 
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