I need a step by step run through of...how to hook up dual hard drives in my computer. I was talking to a producer and he was telling about how he has one hardrive doing one thing and the other one doing its own thing. If anyone is familiar, in that area please elaborate on this. My goal is to get the best performance out of my computer. .a have an 80 GB external hardrive and another PC of to the side. If I could use one or both to my advantage that would be great. .
thanks
Topic Tags
Comments
hi Caisson, there are several ways how to use multiple drives,
hi Caisson,
there are several ways how to use multiple drives,
here is ONE way of doing it, and that's how i have set it up myself:
just hook the drives up within your computer 'normally' i mean drive 1 drive slot one, say, drive 2 drive slot 2 and so on external drive(s) via either usb or firewire (i recommend firewire for audio!!)
use drive one as your application drive and stick your OS on that one plus all your programs, drive two (which should be a 7200rpm drive, better is all drives being 7200rpm for audio work!!) use as your audio drive that means store ALL your audio files, e.g. wave, aiff, sdII, mp3s and so on there and asign this drive to your audio application(s) say logic or cubase as your drive you record on.
if you have a 3rd or 4th drive to hand use it for example to store your sample library on it or use it as an backup drive...
or if you have one very big one say 1600gb or 200+ then partition it into two parts and store on one part your sample library and on the second partition your audio files.
ok in short again
drive 1 OS / apps
drive 2 audio
drive 3 samples
drive 4 backup
or in partitions on less drives...
this is just one example as it depends on how many drives and what drive sizes you have all together...
hope i made sense and it helps...
hi there...this is gucci from new delhi... im actually a lil con
hi there...this is gucci from new delhi...
im actually a lil confused about this drive business m self.
say im going in for a 80 gb hard drive for OS , samples and application data like sofsynths etc...plus a 40 gb for backup...would i still have to divide this pie up using..say a partition magic or something?
please help....
thanks
hi gucci, i am not a complete computer wizard, but i think and
hi gucci,
i am not a complete computer wizard, but i think and friends told me that it makes hardly any sense to partition anything under 80gb, the only advantage is that you are saver in case the HD crashes and you might only loose one partition, in terms of performance no!
also if it happens that you run a mac and OSX don't bother about it, OSX is handling big drives without a problem and no defragmentation.
the os has some 'own' way of not being affected from it, i have been told, and i use OSX and don't defrag anymore... no problems at all....
but maybee a real comp expert is giving us the light on this!
cheers
When you partition a hard drive and it crashes... ALL partitions
When you partition a hard drive and it crashes... ALL partitions go as well! Remember that partitioning a drive doesn't make it several drives..just one drive sectioned into different sizes. Also that when you do partition it and you are using all partitions at once that makes it one drive working extra to keep up with all the activity.
IMHO having built, configured, tweaked and what not to DAW systems I have found that the best scenario is this:
A small 40GB 8MB Cache or higher OS drive with applications installed on to it. Once applications are launched they are very rarely called upon again so installing them onto different drives makes no sense.
With the OS drive attach an optical drive(CDR/W or DVDR/W)
Then you can attach two hard drives on the Secondary IDE Controller. One as slave and the other as master. Again, use 8MB Cached drives or higher. When you use all high cached drives you get a better performance through the PCI bus.
Just make sure to follow the instructions on the jumper settings for the hard drives for proper master or slave settings.
One drive can be used for samples and whatnot and the other for the audio data for the audio app!
Opus :D
I have an 80GB external hard drive........can I use this as a sl
I have an 80GB external hard drive........can I use this as a slave?
also can someone quide me though the areas I need to go to do this. Im just trying to solve some dropout problems and also use the resorces around me to keep my computer, at a level state.
all the input has been great.....
External drives are drives by themselves and do not need to be s
External drives are drives by themselves and do not need to be set as master or slave. They are simply plug and play.
What type of external drive is it? USB? Firewire?
Drop outs could be several things. Lots of tracks and plug ins and the buffer size for the audio card is set too low. When you have a lot of information(Tracks, Plugins, VST's) the sound card needs to be able to handle it so you need to raise the buffer higher.
Very simple...
On the motherboard you have two IDE Controllers. Primary and Secondary. Typically the Primary is BLUE...Attach the OS drive set as Master to this and the CDROM drive to Slave.
The Secondary controller is right next to the Primary and is usually BLACK or GREY. Attach one hard drive as Master and the other as Slave to this controller.
Give us more information as to what you are doing when you get drop outs and what software and any other pertinent information we need to help you.
Also if you are using just the external drive move the session to the OS drive and see if you still get drop outs.
Opus :D
Just reserve one drive for applications ONLY (this would be your
Just reserve one drive for applications ONLY (this would be your C: drive assuming you're on a PC) and don't put anything but your audio files on the other drive(s).
USB can sometimes be problematic with audio streams - if your external is a combo (USB/Firewire) - install a firewire card for $20 and run your audio over it instead. Then you can just use the external "as is". If it's USB only you might benefit from cracking the case, removing the drive and putting it on one of your internal IDE chains, as a previous post suggested.
I wouldn't partition anything though. One big drive per physical drive.
Dirk
USB is very CPU intensive. There are two big CPU hogs within the
USB is very CPU intensive. There are two big CPU hogs within the computer realm...CD ROM Reading and USB bandwidth. USB 2.0 is nice and all but is still not as robust as Firewire.
USB doesn't have the pull like it should.
It's good for printers, cameras, USB microphones and any other silly little toys for the computer....
Audio streaming....not so good.
Opus :D
Here's my setup: 120G SATA Drive C (internal IDE): Windows XP,
Here's my setup:
120G SATA Drive C (internal IDE):
Windows XP, Program Files and nothing else.
120G SATA Drive D (internal IDE):
Current Project Files, Loop Library, SFX Library, Prod. Music Library
Drive E (second IDE):
Sony DRU800A DVD R/RW/DL
Drive F (second IDE):
Sony CRX230E CD R/RW
120G Drive G (external USB):
Daily Backup for Drive C
120G Drive H (external USB):
Daily Backup for Drive D
60G Drive I (external USB):
Games and other non-essentials
Drive K:
Daemon Tools Virtual Drive
So far so good.
Having as much RAM as your motherboard can hold and a fat front side bus helps with any latency issues. Also set your page file size to twice your RAM size and turn off DMA on all drives. And you already discovered the buffer setting in the program driver.
Remember to keep your recording programs on one drive and your recording target on another drive. Never have them on the same drive. Same thing with Photoshop and any other program (especially audio and video) that does heavy processing prior to output.
I had a project going and got a dropout when I had my audio file
I had a project going and got a dropout when I had my audio files going into my external drive via usb......I switched everything back over to the Main C: drive. I believe it was the Usb slowing up the transfer causing the dropout? Thats just my thought on that.....I guess i'll just have to get a new drive that I can slave right off the mother board....I don't want to crack open my external " as was mentioned in one of the replies, I like to transport other things that are on it. Any way check this out what do you think about this PC I just picked up http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7261465&type=product&productCategoryId=pcmcat18700050010&id=1117176782327
I upped my paging size from 1344 to 2000?
and I don't know where to look to make sure my dma is turned on?
Here's Microslops take on it: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/dev
Here's Microslops take on it:
Caisson Just remember that when you buy a store brand PC you w
Caisson
Just remember that when you buy a store brand PC you will have a lot more software on it running than you would want to...which could cause performance problems...make sure you streamline it..optimize it or what not...
Roguescout...good to know that it was a mistake you made! lol..
Indeed, if you aren't using a network where you need to see shared drives turn off indexing in the services as well as each hard drive...indexing is used for shared drives though so if you are sharing drives across a network leave it on...
Opus :D
roguescout wrote: HA! It's been so long since I checked it! YES
roguescout wrote: HA! It's been so long since I checked it!
YES! TURN ON DMA! TURN ON DMA!
Thanks Opus... My bad. Somehow I got that confused with turning OFF the Disk Indexing Service!!!
I really need to get some sleep... :oops:
Disk indexing is completely useless. Turn it off.
Another good tweak for streaming audio into the PC would be to turn off write caching on the drive. You can do it under the properties of the physical disk drive.
This allows the PC to write directly to the drive, rather than caching the data in memory...this will minimize the possibility of your audio skipping or dropping out.
If you do buy an off the shelf PC, do a reinstall of the OS from the ground up (not an image restore though!) and only load on the programs you need.
Dirk
Dirk Yes, disk Indexing itself is useles...I'm talking about th
Dirk
Yes, disk Indexing itself is useles...I'm talking about the actual service Indexing which allows the computer to index networked drives properly to allow you to access them...
Write caching should only be turned off for your operating system drive only. Turning Write Caching off on your audio drives can actually slow the writing time down which is actually crucial when recording audio. If you are simply mixing then it's ok..but if you record keep it on for your audio drives.
Turning off write caching makes it so that reading has more priority than writing to the drive. You don't get a lot of improvement and some systems may not take to turning off Write Caching so just make sure your system is ok with it...if not turn it back on!
Cheers
Opus :D
Opus2000 wrote: Dirk Yes, disk Indexing itself is useles...I'm
Opus2000 wrote: Dirk
Yes, disk Indexing itself is useles...I'm talking about the actual service Indexing which allows the computer to index networked drives properly to allow you to access them...
Write caching should only be turned off for your operating system drive only. Turning Write Caching off on your audio drives can actually slow the writing time down which is actually crucial when recording audio. If you are simply mixing then it's ok..but if you record keep it on for your audio drives.
Turning off write caching makes it so that reading has more priority than writing to the drive. You don't get a lot of improvement and some systems may not take to turning off Write Caching so just make sure your system is ok with it...if not turn it back on!
Cheers
Opus :D
Opus,
Interesting about the write caching. 99% of what I do is on-location multitrack recording. I've always been told by "those in the know" here locally that I should turn off write caching to improve throughput. As it was explained to me, write caching writes to a memory buffer and when it fills the buffer it does a bulk write to the disk and resets the cache. Probably not a big deal for an in-studio thing, but not so good while writing 20+ tracks at 24/48 for 2-3 hours without stopping.
So are you saying this is not actually how it works? I'm an IT guy by day as well, but I will admit that write caching has always been something I didn't really understand fully as far as how it pertains to recording digital audio...
Dirk
Yes, I did some tests on throughput with the write caching on a
Yes, I did some tests on throughput with the write caching on and off and indeed the results showed that you get more reading speed when the write caching was off...in fact it was quite a huge difference...I'll have to see if I can find those test results again but I do remember that you want to keep the write caching on for the audio data drives..
I'm somewhat of an IT guy as well as being a complete and total DAW geek! I did a ton of testing when P4's started hitting the market with all possible settings and I found that write caching should be on...
Again, I'll see if I can find those tests or simply run some more!
I'm sure they'll be different with 8MB Cached drives but I'm dure the results will be basically the same..
Cheers
Opus :D
you guys have helped out alot. I have been able to learn so muc
you guys have helped out alot. I have been able to learn so much more about music and computers since i've been here....truely a blessing! I quess now what im going to do is reinstall my OS like tnjazz advised. I think that this should help me out in the long run. Im not really sure what I need on my OS, but i'll figure it out.
Once again can some tell me if this computer seems pretty good..
Personally IMHO I would avoid anything with PCI Express video as
Personally IMHO I would avoid anything with PCI Express video as it' seems to be a crap shoot as to whether it works ok or not...
Also remember that store bought machines like the eMachine come with too much software installed that can cause more problems than you would want...I would uninstall everything that you don't need for DAW use...
The OS is the Media Center version which I have no experience with in terms of DAW use. I am not sure if it will be the same or worse...maybe someone else can chime in on that.
Opus :D
I would not recommend an eMachine. You get what you pay for. I
I would not recommend an eMachine. You get what you pay for.
I would not recommend any major brand PC that comes preinstalled with a factory software package if the computer is going to be used for average to serious audio work.
Those computers are designed and built with the average home user in mind. They are not designed for the needs of audio and music production.
You would be better off building your own bare bones system with a specific task for it in mind. Or check out the machines built by these companies:
Rain Recording
Sweetwater Creation Station
Sonica Labs
ADK Pro Audio
configure as one master and one slave. simple as that.
configure as one master and one slave. simple as that.