What DAW software are you using? How many audio tracks are you running? What are the specs on your computer?

My philosophy is, one drive for audio, one for samples, and the other for everything else. Here's my setup. I'm using Logic Pro 6 on a G4 733 with 3 HDDs

1 60Gig 7200 RPM 2MB
2 120Gig 7200 RPM 2MB

the 60 houses my OS and all applications, including software instruments (in my case AUs). You won't get a speed increase by putting applications or VSTi's on a separate HDD because upon startup, the app gets loaded into RAM.

One of the 120s has vocals and other tracks.

The other 120 has samples.

Since the EXS does disk streaming, i thought it best to put the samples on a separate drive. If your sampler of choice does disk streaming, then I would suggest you put them on a separate drive. Even putting them on the 5400 RPM drive would be better. Or better yet, move the OS and apps to the 5400 RPM drive, and use the 40GB 7200 RPM drive for your samples.

Consider partitioning your OS drive, to provide storage for miscellaneous stuff.

Change the channel...

Hey,
Good advice. Also, try to refrain from putting ANY hard drive on the same channel as an optical drive or slower peripheral such as ZIP drives, etc.

The "Computer Music" mag (or was it "Future Music"?) from the UK had a series of articles this past winter regarding setting up hard drives for DAWs. There's even a "best" way to do it on the cheap with just one drive, though they advise against it, of course. I could try to find my back issues and make .pdfs of the articles if anyone is interested.

Hey, thanks for the responses.

My setup is this:
AMD XP2100+
512 PC2100
Cubase SX 2
Usually max 8 tracks audio (not including samples)

i do have a dvdr as slave to the 120gb, but i have read many conflicting acounts of whether this affects performance or not. Some say it does, others think it's ludicrous. I will have to research deeper on that subject as it will probably be a deciding factor here. I would be interested in those pdf's if you do spend time to make them.

My OS drive is partioned as 15gb NTFS for handling 4gb+ files, 15gb FAT32 OS partition, 8gb sampler partition.

Thanks for the feedback, I will have to do some more searching on a few issues.

-a

Re: Change the channel...

Tarzanalog wrote:
The "Computer Music" mag (or was it "Future Music"?) from the UK had a series of articles this past winter regarding setting up hard drives for DAWs. There's even a "best" way to do it on the cheap with just one drive, though they advise against it, of course. I could try to find my back issues and make .pdfs of the articles if anyone is interested.

Yeah, I'd love that!

Also let me ask you:

with three drives one of them will end on the same IDE controller as the cd-rom drive, which is much slower and will cause a bottle neck? How did you set up the whole thing?

I have my OS drive on the same bus as the CDRW. In real worlod terms, it does feel a little slower, but no deal killer. I don't notice it at all when it comes to playing back a cpu and/or disk intensive song.

if you could i would like acopy of those pdfs as well

frob

mjones-- Are you using a Sonnet Tempo card to get that third drive into your Mac? I'm curious as to how well it works. If you are using something else I'm REALLY curious as to who makes it since I thought Sonnet was the only company to make PCI to ATA expansion buses for Macintosh. Thanks in advance!