Will separate hard drives help latency?

  • Thread starter Thread starter playit
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playit

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I have always heard the recommendation not to record to the same drive as your system, but I have for quite awhile. I was wondering if I got a second drive to record to if it would cut my latency and get rid of pops during playback?
 
I always assumed that you should record to your non-system drive just incase you get a terminal virus or your primary drive fails.. very rarely will you get a virus on a backup drive, it %95 of the time, will attack or download to your system drive.
 
The second drive for audio is purely for drive speed and consistency purposes. Your DAW app will seek in too many places on the hard disc while at the same it is trying to stream audio files. This greatly decreases your possible track count and will increase the possibility of clicks and pops. It shouldn't really affect your latency though as latency is buffer related.
 
That's cool. I started recording at 96khz recently and it introduced a couple of problems. Higher latency, plus it seemed like during playback I have more tendency for pops and clicks. So I added some RAM to 1 GB and that still didn't help my latency issue. I guess adding a hard drive would fix the pops and clicks then. What if I went to 2 GB would I possibly be able to lower my buffer size and get better latency?
 
i run the risk of being wrong again by answering this, but i doubt more ram will make your system access the HD faster, that's more of a rpm issue. maybe go for a raid configuration or something, or one of those 1000rpm drives.
 
playit said:
That's cool. I started recording at 96khz recently and it introduced a couple of problems. Higher latency, plus it seemed like during playback I have more tendency for pops and clicks. So I added some RAM to 1 GB and that still didn't help my latency issue. I guess adding a hard drive would fix the pops and clicks then. What if I went to 2 GB would I possibly be able to lower my buffer size and get better latency?
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Doubling you RAM will normally help but sometimes the motherboard can't utilize it. Check that out before you do it. Another hard drive will definitely help but more than likely the answer is to reduce the buffer size to get rid of the clicks and pops.
 
Given what youa re trying to do, I have a feelign that lowering your buffer will increase your clicks and pops until you get a dedicated audio drive. Not a partition, but an actual drive. Increasing RAM may help a little by allowing you to get into a lower buffer setting without issues which would afford you a better latency. Definately check with your motherboard specs though before you blindly install more RAM. Also, what is your setup like? Especially what soundcard are you using? Does your soundcard offer any zero latency direct monitoring features such as MOTU's CUe mix and RME's Total Mix?
 
My motherboard can definitely go past 1 GB. It can actually go up to 3 if I recall correctly.

The sound card is a Delta 1010LT. It does have direct monitoring but that's pretty annoying. I'm going to screw around with the ASIO settings and what not. My project's done though, so I won't have any material to really test it with for awhile.
 
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