No. 5400 rpm has never been adequate for any music production purpose. You need a minimum of 7200 rpm's on the platter.

Hello Keala!!

Welcome to our Recording.org forum. I hope, you will visit us more often and don't hesitate to bring on your problems and inputs.
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The last 5400er I wasted together with an old office PC, years ago.
I wonder, if those are still being manufactured, at all.
With prices down to 50 Euro for a Tera Byte, 7200 rpm drive with 32 MB cash...
who wants an old dynosaur with 5400...

With PCs of the last few years, already, the 7200 rpm drive is and was the bottleneck of the system.
People are building complicated RAID setups with 7200 and 10.000 rpm drives to overcome the lack of throughput.
If you ever want to record and produce music, for a band, e.g., you will need a 7200 rpm drive badly.
You might want to keep the 5400 rpm drive for sound libraries, back-ups or maybe even as system drive,
but I do NOT recommend that, at all....

But: get yourself 2 or three drives.... 1 for the OS and programs, 1 only for the projects and one for VSTi libraries, backups, SFXs, videoClips, etc...
and , if you can, don't put anything else on your audio PC that is not necessary for production. You safe yourself a lot of problems..and make backups before you defraggle the drives every few weeks.

Cheers, ...

Thanks gang :smile:

Big K, I just bought this new Gateway computer with a 5400rpm from Best Buy 4 months ago, so apparantly these slow hard drives are still being incorporated in new computers. Wish I had knew this information before I bought it. But anyway, I took your advice and my computer is in surgery as I write this with a new Seagate 7200rpm, 32 cache being installed.

I'll also look into a secondary drive soon.
Thanks again!

Keala

If you record at all seriously you will want a USB or firewire or eSATA external hard drive. If this is a desktop then that can easily be a secondary internal hard drive too. Yes, new computers are still shipped with 5400 rpm drives and nearly all commercially manufactured externals are 5400 rpms so if the label does not specifically state 7200 or faster then it isn't.

Jeezzee, that is like buying a fast car with tyres limited to 160 Km/h.

Keala
You can use the 5400 as a library drive for VSTi samples. But it should be a fairly large drive. A 250 GB might be filled up in no time....
Mine is at 960 GB, atm, and Trillian arrives next week.

"Gateway computer with a 5400rpm from Best Buy 4 months ago, so apparantly these slow hard drives are still being incorporated in new computers. "

Notebook...this isn't a computer per se...

Notebook? Never said I bought a notebook computer.

This is the Gateway computer I have.
[[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.newegg.c…"]Newegg.com - Gateway DX Series DX4300-11 Phenom II X4 805(2.5GHz) 8GB DDR2 1TB ATI Radeon HD 3200 Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit[/]="http://www.newegg.c…"]Newegg.com - Gateway DX Series DX4300-11 Phenom II X4 805(2.5GHz) 8GB DDR2 1TB ATI Radeon HD 3200 Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit[/]

Nice PC, a little aged with its about 2 years old CPU, but if it is running with DDR-3 RAM it is about the same Q6600 powerI have on this PC I am writing on, at home.
It would be sufficient for any CD production, CPU power-wise. I had a 2-core Intel with 2,4 GHz DDR-2 as main studio machine for a long time... for film, music, anything..
Have a close look at the power supply. Although an UAD-2 card eats less then 20 watts, there should always be some reduntant power above the average overall consumption.
Faulty or overstressed PSUs are one of the most common defects.

With a new hard drive.....Since it is a desktop I would set up a single main drive and a pair of identical "audio drives" in RAID array. Main drive should still be 7200 and the raid drives could be 7200 or faster.

Hmmm I've had 5400s installed over the years and never had a problem. At the time I had two loaded RBus cards and a pair of DIOs feeding Sonar 2.2. I only upgraded to the faster spins when I ran out of space and needed more. All of them are now SATA 7200s except one which is an IDE ( it just won't die!) Just waiting for the cost to go down and the capacity of the SSDs to go up before moving the boot and program drives over to those platforms. All that being said its amazing what a good PSU will do for a computer with 8 drives in it.