No one? Guess its not yet time.

tj

I will be soon. I'll let you know.

Nick

Ok, Nick. Are you planning an Intel or AMD build? I'd be curious to hear which chipset you chose.

tj

I have a Seagate 120Gig SATA drive for about 4 months now. Runs ok but do not expect supersonic speeds. It's about the same as a regular 7200rpm IDE drive. The only advantage I think is that it uses different bus.

thx,

chris

hey, Chris.

Not much diff, huh? You're running a single SATA drive? Is that your data drive only (System and recording software on IDE)?

I've been toying with an idea lately. Since thruput is the real bottleneck in a DAW, I wonder if using 3 diff drives would improve things. I'm considering:

1. System Disk with OS and recording software
2. Read disk with WAVs from existing tracks.
3. Write disk for WAVs currently being recorded.

Depending on the software, this might be a bit tricky to maintain. But thought it might be worth a try. And SATA makes it that much more attractive.

tj

I have 3 PATA drives, but my utilization is a little different.

1) 60GB (3 partitions) OS9/OSX and Programs/Miscellaneous storage

2) 120GB Vocals and 'live' tracks.

3) 120GB Samples for EXS24 streaming.

Works well for me. Just a thought. It would be hell to have to copy tracks to the other disk all the time, not to mention having to search for files. Plus it seems like a finished song would exist on only one drive, negating the load balancing.

I'm also waiting to get into the SATA realm, but because my HD config does me well, I don't feel a rush, although, the WD Raptor is tempting.
king mitz.

Hey, Mitz.

Hmmmmm.. Interesting strategy. Using 2 disks to supply the data makes sense.

I use a removable tray so I can swap projects easily. I'm not sure I can squeeze another tray into my existing tower. As I recall, the motherboard get in the way of the only open 5 1/4" bay.

Hmmmm... maybe USB or 1394... hmmmmm... You got me thinking, bud.

tj

[ October 01, 2003, 01:00 PM: Message edited by: Teej813 ]

Bump.

Anyone else using SATA for DAW work? I'm looking at the VIA KT600 chipset for AMD.

tj

3dChris,

can you post some DiskSpeed32 benchmarks for your SATA drive to give us an idea?

A few days ago I just couldn't resist a sweet deal for a 160GB Western Digital (7200rpm, 8MB buffer, comes with it's own Ultra ATA card to work around the "137GB limit" in a lot of machines). Came out to be $100 after mail-in-rebates.

This new disk achieves an average of 56,500 kBytes/s transfer rate on my system (using the included Ultra ATA card) compared to about 40,000 kBytes/s for my next closest UDMA100 HD with a 2MB buffer ...

You can download DiskSpeed32 for free from here:
http://www.devhood.com/tools/tool_details.aspx?tool_id=348

MisterBlue.

Originally posted by Teej813:
Hey, Mitz.

Hmmmmm.. Interesting strategy. Using 2 disks to supply the data makes sense.

I use a removable tray so I can swap projects easily. I'm not sure I can squeeze another tray into my existing tower. As I recall, the motherboard get in the way of the only open 5 1/4" bay.

Hmmmm... maybe USB or 1394... hmmmmm... You got me thinking, bud.

tj

Teej,
It works, but the only thing for me is that my delta66 is disagreeable to ATA controllers. So I have my system drive mastering my CDRW, and the data drives sharing the other bus,

So I'm still bottlenecking.

1394b would be good. The interface is fast enough that it doesn't bottleneck the drive. That's what I'm going to do when I switch to OSX.

USB requires more processor overhead than FW, so that might not be ideal for you.

mitz