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Hard Drives!

anonymous
Submitted by anonymous on

I know this has probley been asked plenty of times before.. I'm am buying a Laptop Pentium 4 3.06Ghz, 1GB ram, 100GB hard drive computer with some USB's and a Firewire. I am running Cubase SE and some other plugins and stuff.. I know I need an external hard drive.. I dont know exatly what I should put on the drive that comes with the comp..Should I just have the OS, Cubase SE, plugins, and synths on that hard drive.. And then use the external for saving all the projects, files, wavs, and other stuff to.. Or do I only use it for the OS and put everything else on the external.. And also what is better in ur opinion USB 2.0 or Firewire for recording files to?



THANKS for all your help! :)

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RemyRad
RemyRAD

Yes, as you surmised, the computer's internal hard disk drive should have your operating system and all of your software and plug-ins. Generally you should not try and utilize your system drive for capture and playback purposes. You can use it to store some of your completed projects/music files. You should always leave a fair amount of available system disk space for virtual memory and caching purposes. You should defragment both your system and storage drive often and prior to any projects you are working on. I don't recommend using the same machine for Internet usage and recording purposes. You should have a minimum of features running in the background.



Your external hard drive should contain all of your audio/video files along with possibly your " session" files that direct your software's functions for that particular group of saved audio/video files.



I have been using mostly FireWire drives for my external storage. USB 2.0 is also quite popular and is slightly faster than FireWire 1.0. FireWire and USB are like men and women. They are the same but different. Only you can determine what is best for your purposes and/or based on the recommendations by the software manufacturer.



FireWire gal

Ms. Remy Ann David

Tue, 03/14/2006 - 19:53 Permalink
anonymous
anonymous

Oge,





Even though USB2.0 specs it's data rates at 480 mb/s and Firewire A (IEEE-1394a) specs at 400 mb/s

Firewire is still quite a bit FASTER and outperforms USB 2.0.

If you've got Firewire B (IEEE-1394b) it's yet even faster (800 mb/s).



There are some very technical reasons for this related to theoretical cable speeds (bandwidth) for the shared devices (127 devices on USB2 and 63 devices on Firewire) vs backplane, but I won't get into the technobabble unless you really want to know why.



Firewire under Win 2000 or XP (with the SIDSpeed correction setting applied to the XP Service Pack 2 - see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 ) will seriously outperform USB 2.0 in 2000 or XP for Hard Drive, video, and audio operations by almost twice as much data per second.



For the best possible performance use Firewire for your recording device and Ext. HD.





Set it up with Wavs/Aifs recording to the Ext. HD and the OS and Programs on the Internal Drive.



Remy is correct about that and that you should defrag often!



If you're doing a lot of synths/virtual instruments or VST effects also seriously consider upgrading your RAM to 2GB.



Setup your "Processor Scheduling" for "Background Services".

Start / Run / %windir%system32sysdm.cpl

Advanced / Performance Settings / Advanced





Disable all unnecessary services in

Start / Run / %windir%system32services.msc









KJ

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Kyro Studios

Tue, 03/14/2006 - 23:42 Permalink
anonymous
anonymous

The only Services that need be running (Started) for Cubase SE3 usage are:



Com+ Event System

Cryptographic Services

DCOM Server Process Launcher

Distributed Link Tracking Client

Event Log

Plug and Play

Protected Storage

Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

Security Accounts Manager

Shell Hardware Detection

System Event Notification

System Restore Service

Themes

Windows Audio

Windows Instrumentation Management

Workstation

(make sure any hardware specific services are also Started -

NVIDIA helpers etc..)









KJ

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KYRO Studios

Tue, 03/14/2006 - 23:54 Permalink