ok my advice if your just running a software studio going 64 bit all around would be efficent enough to drive your setup. Have the two drives one as the boot disk and keep the other for storage. unless your dual booting to a unix base i wouldn't be to concern with win xp pro.

oh partition the boot disk so you can have a even more storage on your boot disk..just partition it right down the middle. Leave your second drive as a one partiton and that way on your system it looks like you have 3 hard drives insted on 2.

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://ironworksent…"]Pro Audio Matrix[/]="http://ironworksent…"]Pro Audio Matrix[/]

leemart wrote:
Could i partition the 2x 250's equally down the middle and configure them in raid 0 as 2 drives (for the dual boot) and share a common audio drive (2x 320's in raid 0)

Yes and yes, though I'm not sure that Raid is ideal for audio. It may cause more problems that it solves because you are constantly streaming from disk. I don't know that for sure but I'm a bit leery of the idea. Someone else may come along and correct me however.

hueseph wrote: [quote=leemart]
Could i partition the 2x 250's equally down the middle and configure them in raid 0 as 2 drives (for the dual boot) and share a common audio drive (2x 320's in raid 0)

Yes and yes, though I'm not sure that Raid is ideal for audio. It may cause more problems that it solves because you are constantly streaming from disk. I don't know that for sure but I'm a bit leery of the idea. Someone else may come along and correct me however.pro tools is funny when it comes to drives i can't speak for how other systems react to it.

I wonder...what would be the advantage of putting the OS on a RAID 0 setup for 500G worth?

There are a few things you could consider.

Are these all SATA drives, BTW? Are you using onboard RAID, or do you have a RAID card? Check what you can about people's experience with your onboard RAID configuration.

I'm trying to envision this, but without knowing if your drives are SATA or PATA, I can't decide how to bring something up.

Is it wise to use 500G (2x250, RAID 0) for an OS drive? Even 250G is WAY more than you'll possibly need. You could use one 250 for OS and programs, partitioned for the OS to not be overly large, and one 250 for backup/samples/etc. And then if you think your RAID configuration is up to it, and want to try it, use the 2 320's for audio.

Do you really need 640G of room to record on? It might be an idea to even partition that to give you enough room to record the project or two that you currently are working on, and larger part for moving things out of the way?

A clean, smaller partition may give better performance. If you have a dozen multi-track tunes on there, and are trying to do another, then the stuff has to read and write around and between what's already there. This forces those pointy little heads to skitter all over the place like a hyped-up meth freak looking for places to fit things in. It takes a bit more time to search, find, read and write. It also causes more movement, which causes more wear, which may cause an earlier disk failure.

Of course, defragging will help a bit...if you do it all the time. May be just as good to move one tune from the smaller "active work" partition of the drives to the "standby", and keep each other from tripping over the other?

Also, the more room you give a drive to work, and the more stuff you have on it, and the more fragmented it becomes...the further out the heads may move to read and write. So now, instead of constraining them to a smaller, more-quickly accessible area, they are bouncing violently from here to there, with possibly more swing, which may cause more wear.

Since I have a much smaller RAID 0 setup, I didn't worry about partitioning them. (I THINK you can partition RAID drives?)

But, I use that for only audio, I have my OS drive (disk 1) partitioned smaller, with the larger portion as backup 1, the second drive partitioned for other things, with it's remainder as backup 2.

This way, I have two backups on two separate drives until I take the time to back them up externally, which makes me feel a bit safer. I back up all my downloads, and everything else to at least those two drives right away.

If you could partition that RAID drive, you'd have stuff on that, and at least one other drive to backup to.
Be careful with RAID 0. It's there for a bit more speed than other RAID configurations, but it provides no redundancy. One drive of the set goes bad, you lose all your data from both. That's why it may be a waste, and not a good idea to put your OS on RAID 0. You are basically using four drives to make two. You are wasting at least one that could provide a safety net of some kind.

Just some thoughts. As always, open to debate.

Kapt.Krunch