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greetings!

So as l stated in my subject l have a new machine w/ three hard drive in my quad core 3gig RAM machine. But l don't know what software should go where? after talking to a few people l got a couple of different answers on what would be more efficient and what would help my programs run faster and safer.

computer tech gamer friend that builds pc's says

1 ide 20 gig install XP os in it

1 ide 80 gig install komplete (50 gigs + Cubase 4)

1 sata 320 gig for recording audio

this seems to me to be a reasonable setup but to me appears there MIGHT be some latency issues.

however, after talking to a digital recording savy guy, (but uses mac)he stated i should install my programs like this

mac user, MIDI and music biz proffesor states ...

20 gig ide just a spare drive

80 gig ide audio files

320 gig sata XP o.s Komplete4 and Cubase 4 and do editing on my sata drive.
totally different from the gamers idea.

both setup ideas come from experienced users.But l would like to know how some of you guys in the PC recording field take advantage of todays advanced cpu processing and how you arrange your programs when having 2 or more drives. thanks guys .
ps my audio midi interface is a Tascam fw-1804

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Comments

hueseph Fri, 06/13/2008 - 10:24

Smaller drives are slower since they have to cover more rotations to access the data. A larger drive is better even for your OS. Anyway Hard Drives are dirt cheap. I remember paying hundreds of dollars for a 64MB Hard drive that was the size of four paperbacks stacked on top of each other. Now you can get thousands of times that for 50 bucks. Generally a 160GB SATA drive goes for about $50.

hueseph Fri, 06/13/2008 - 11:29

Think about it. A 20gig hard drive at 7200 rpm will have to spin a lot more than a 160gig at 7200 to read the same amount of data. It's just logic and very simple physics. Why? simply because the 20gig hard drive uses up more physical space than a 160 gig hard drive to read/write the same amount of data. Sure, use a separate drive but use a bigger hard drive than 20 GB. Also if you're OS after updates and security patches is 5GB, that's 1/4 of your drive!

I have my OS and software on one 80 Gig Hard Drive My samples on a secondary 120GB drive and another 120GB drive(which I plan to upgrade) for audio. I still think the 80GB is too small and too slow for my OS/Software.

Kapt.Krunch Sun, 06/15/2008 - 06:25

hueseph wrote: Think about it. A 20gig hard drive at 7200 rpm will have to spin a lot more than a 160gig at 7200 to read the same amount of data. It's just logic and very simple physics. Why? simply because the 20gig hard drive uses up more physical space than a 160 gig hard drive to read/write the same amount of data. Sure, use a separate drive but use a bigger hard drive than 20 GB. Also if you're OS after updates and security patches is 5GB, that's 1/4 of your drive!

That has some validity, but you may also consider partitioning a larger, faster drive to a smaller partition for the OS, with the rest as storage/temp. Why?
The platters are still the same physical diameter. And, you don't NEED 300GB for OS and programs. If you partition it so the OS and programs use a smaller area, and the fastest partition, then the heads move over much less area (less-wide swings), and the data is more concentrated to a smaller physical area for faster read/write.

Make sense?

And, don't forget to experiment with with your audio drive to find a good balance of settings when you format that.

Kapt.Krunch

hueseph Sun, 06/15/2008 - 15:08

Space wrote: back in the late 70's I could almost tell the difference in a few milliseconds... but isn't 7200rpm still 7200rpm and an average seektime of, say, 8 ms still an average seektime of 8ms?

Seek time is exactly that. Seek time. The amount of time it takes for the drive to "find" the info you're loading. Throughput is something else altogether and is variable depending on the size of the drive and where on the drive the data is written.

anonymous Tue, 06/17/2008 - 09:54

thanks for the replies i will keep you updated with my setup and how it all turns out.. what im soley after is zero latency for my Komplete 5 samples which can be some what of a cpu hog.
normaly i work inside the yamaha motif sequencer. honestly i don't really need to move up to soft synths since the motif works at a pro level. but you never know what you might discover using a cpu

anonymous Thu, 06/19/2008 - 06:30

I'm with ADK audio on this one.

1. Use the drive with the highest data rate for recording and playing tracks only.
2. The OS and program drive should be separate from all of your digital audio, and doesn't need to be that fast, especially with 3 Gigs of memory.
3. A drive for samples sounds like a good idea, but I haven't tried it.

I use a 10k rpm 80 Gig SATA drive for projects I am working on, and a slower 120 Gig drives for projects that are on the back burner and my OS and programs. When I want to work on something from the back burner I move it back to my fast drive.

Partitioning never made sense to me if you have multiple drives.

Space Thu, 06/19/2008 - 18:18

Partitioning used to make sense, really!

Did I ever tell about the time in the late 80's or early 90's I had a 20 meg brick of a hard drive rebuilt for 250.00(usd) simply because a new one would have been more or was unavailable(I don't remember really), iirc?

What about "stacker"? That was a great tool!The MS version that came later was called DoubleSpace". But who needs data compression these days?

We have all the space we need right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

You rich people with all yer fangly new gizmos... Vista has a "inbuilt" partitioning program for the creation, deletion and movement of partitions!!!

Wtf?

It's a world gone mad and you can see it all in High Def!!!

anonymous Thu, 06/19/2008 - 18:31

ok here is my final program setup for my drives.

300gig(SATA) Partition it 20 gigs for cubase4./ 280gigs audiophile music

80gig drive-(IDE)Komplete4 library(50 gigs total) and maaaaybe Reason but i doubt ill buy even after my prof teaches his 2nd part of MIDI credited course based on Reason 4

20gig(IDE) solely for the purpose of running a stripped down no games or ms paint or mydocuments or any of that junkon on my WinXP O.S.

From what i got from geckomusic is not to put the program
(im asuming program means cubase or Komplete4 ) but if thats the case then partitioning should not be such a bad deal.
i expect negative latency on my T1000

hueseph Thu, 06/19/2008 - 22:11

SeniorFedup wrote: 300gig(SATA) Partition it 20 gigs for cubase4./ 280gigs audiophile music

This looks bad to me. You should keep all your programs running from one drive.

80gig drive-(IDE)Komplete4 library(50 gigs total) and maaaaybe Reason but i doubt ill buy even after my prof teaches his 2nd part of MIDI credited course based on Reason 4

This is also bad. 50 Gigs used on an 80 Gig drive? that's almost 75% usage. I start freaking out when my drive gets beyond 50%. the more info on the drive the slower it potentially can be. The more you fill a drive the further "out" you write to the drive. Same as with CDs. There's a 48x max read/write time at the center of the disc but the further toward the edge of the disk, the less info is written per rotation.

20gig(IDE) solely for the purpose of running a stripped down no games or ms paint or mydocuments or any of that junkon on my WinXP O.S.

I still think this is too small.

From what i got from geckomusic is not to put the program
(im asuming program means cubase or Komplete4 ) but if thats the case then partitioning should not be such a bad deal.
i expect negative latency on my T1000

All this does is minimize fragmentation. It won't necessarily increase performance. The programs are still on the same drive.

Just go spend another $50 on a 160Gig drive. Use the 80Gig for OS and programs. The 160gig for samples.

anonymous Fri, 06/20/2008 - 10:32

lol code monkey.

good idea huseph i might just go in the next few hours to pick up a refurbished sata 160g for samples.

Hey all, so far all l got was a 160 gig sata hard drive , and what do you know , its still in the package since saturday. All im waiting for now is for windows to arrive in the mail from my manufacturer.... im tired of waiting :oops:
on top of that i got about 20 or 25 cubic feet of catering equip comming into the garage (my studio!) so that needs to be organized.!

anonymous Fri, 07/18/2008 - 13:28

hey all!
i got my computer hooked and runs like a cheetah
C:drive has windowsXP on a 80 gig drive
E:drive has cubase4 and komplete4(65gigs total) on a 160 gig sata drive
f:drive 300gig sata for audio.
sorry for the late update but i will say this the big downfall with this setup is now my cpu is pretty noisy. perhaps it could be that i connected a fan that appeared to be off before. but its pretty loud and might have to place it outside the room .

if not are there any ideas on how to silence this beast