A really basic PC question

[Stalker]

Does having a dual drive setting separating the programs from the audio files really makes a diference in terms of RAM and CPU load?

 

I once heard, it helps running your sequencer better, especially when recording, but I'm not really sure about it

and I would like to know the logic behind this

[Jikkenteki]

Having two separate physical drives, one with your program data and one with the audio file data is a good idea. Doing this enables the audio data drive to focus purely on writing and reading the audio data and other drive deals with only the program aspects. Having two partitions on a single drive however negates any advantage at all as the reading aspect of the hardware has to constantly jump back and forth between partitions.

[Stalker]

Having two separate physical drives, one with your program data and one with the audio file data is a good idea. Doing this enables the audio data drive to focus purely on writing and reading the audio data and other drive deals with only the program aspects. Having two partitions on a single drive however negates any advantage at all as the reading aspect of the hardware has to constantly jump back and forth between partitions.

644675[/snapback]

 

Thanks Jikkenteki

 

Ok so lets say one have already one drive containing all the programs and audio files

 

Should he create another drive and change the locations of those audio files and keep the main programs on the default drive ( C:\ )? Or should he create another driver just for the programs related to audio processing? Having then three drivers

 

For ex:

 

C:\ for Windows related program

E:\ for audio related programs

F:\ for audio files

[Jikkenteki]

A second physical drive only for your audio programs may or maynot be overkill. The most imporant point that is that you go out and buy a second actual hard disc for the audio files drive. Creating partitions on one actual physical hard disc does nothing for you. My computer's kind of old, but I have one 40Gig hard disc for my C drive will Cubase and all my vsts and such installed on it. My second hard disc is a 250 gig one as my D drive that has all my samples, track folders and such and all audio gets recorded to and played back from this disc. With his set up I've never had any disc reading speed issue ever.

[Stalker]

A second physical drive only for your audio programs may or maynot be overkill. The most imporant point that is that you go out and buy a second actual hard disc for the audio files drive. Creating partitions on one actual physical hard disc does nothing for you. My computer's kind of old, but I have one 40Gig hard disc for my C drive will Cubase and all my vsts and such installed on it. My second hard disc is a 250 gig one as my D drive that has all my samples, track folders and such and all audio gets recorded to and played back from this disc. With his set up I've never had any disc reading speed issue ever.

644703[/snapback]

 

Ah Now I understand. Thanks for clarifying that

[Kalki]

yeh. its really an advantage for both recording also managing audio files except one thing when u r opening ur project it will take more time to load the sample files from the other drive. where it will be faster if ur laoding from ur sequencer folder.

[NEMO.BOFH]

Thanks Jikkenteki

 

Ok so lets say one have already one drive containing all the programs and audio files

 

Should he create another drive and change the locations of those audio files and keep the main programs on the default drive ( C:\ )? Or should he create another driver just for the programs related to audio processing? Having then three drivers 

 

For ex:

 

C:\ for Windows related program

E:\ for audio related programs

F:\ for audio files

644693[/snapback]

I have done a lot of experimenting with this, and here is what I have found, and I am running right now:

 

C:\Windows for Entertainment (Chat, Web, Games etc etc) (120GB Standalone drive)

D:\Windows for all my Audio applications. (250GB Standalone drive)

E:\Audio Drive (All samples, all Arrangements) (250 GB Standalone drive)

 

I dont use the in built windows defragger either, I use Executive Disk Keeper profiessional. I run a Defrag around twice a month on the audio drive, and once every 2 months on my Drive with the audio applications.

 

If they are very old drives that you are using, or you have had windows installed on them for a long time, or even installed windows over and over on them many times, then you might wanna consider low-level format the drives. I low level format every 6 months. It really helps performance.

 

If you want to have more tips and tricks setting up a perfect system, then go to:

 

http://www.musicxp.net/ this dude knows his shit

 

If you have any other questions, then post them, I am more than willing to dig into tricky audio computer questions!

[Stalker]

I have done a lot of experimenting with this, and here is what I have found, and I am running right now:

 

C:\Windows for Entertainment (Chat, Web, Games etc etc)

D:\Windows for all my Audio applications.

E:\Audio Drive (All samples, all Arrangements)

 

I dont use the in built windows defragger either, I use Executive Disk Keeper profiessional. I run a Defrag around twice a month on the audio drive, and once every 2 months on my Drive with the audio applications.

 

If they are very old drives that you are using, or you have had windows installed on them for a long time, or even installed windows over and over on them many times, then you might wanna consider low-level format the drives. I low level format every 6 months. It really helps performance.

 

If you want to have more tips and tricks setting up a perfect system, then go to:

 

http://www.musicxp.net/ this dude knows his shit

 

If you have any other questions, then post them, I am more than willing to dig into tricky audio computer questions!

644752[/snapback]

Hey nemo thanks

Thats great help

 

I'll have to act carefully to this change, cause I think my sequencer will crach since I assigned all of my sample patchs on the Drive C:\

I'll proably have to clear the instruments list and assign them again later, on their new drive patch

[NEMO.BOFH]

Hey nemo thanks

Thats great help

 

I'll have to act carefully to this change, cause I think my sequencer will crach since I assigned all of my sample patchs on the Drive C:\

I'll proably have to clear the instruments list and assign them again later, on their new drive patch

644758[/snapback]

It will most probably just ask you to browse for the missing sample patches.

[dharma lab]

The 3 drive setup is helpful. I use 3 drives myself. The simplified idea behind it is this:

 

1) 3 drives essentially means 3 heads that could be reading/writing simulataneously. So, your windows OS on 1 drive, your audio programs on another, & your audio files on a 3rd means that the tasks get broken up more. (Each drive actually contains multiple heads, writing on multiple platters, but the heads move together as 1)

 

2) The first parts of the hard drive read/write faster than the later parts. Not a huge difference, but helpful.

[Mike A]

anyone using raid?

[CosmicEquilibrium]

I think the better idea is have 3 hd or 3 partitions.

 

1 - For windows, office, anti virus, all programs you need...

2 - For windows, optimized for audio just with you audio tools and DAW's, there you can remove the windows programs and services you don't need, leave in there just SO and audio requirements without tcp/ip, graphics for the best performance, without backup and secure systems, you can tweak all your windows xp with some appropriate tools like nlite.

3- For all your data audio data, docs, movies, mp3, pdf's everyting.

 

Anyway you can remove all your spyware, virus, disable services like system restore security center system, file indexing in all hard drives , do some stuff like search in goodle how to optimize windows xp, i found this site and it helps a a lot check here: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html all the optimize tools you need are there.

 

Anyway if you have sata 2 and one pentium duo core, your machine will fly, and pentium quo core is coming

 

anyone using raid?

645434[/snapback]

Raid is just for backup i think one home user don't need it, burn some dvd's with your important data and save one more hd for you do what you want

 

[]

[Mike A]

Anyway if you have sata 2 and one pentium duo core, your machine will fly, and pentium quo core is coming

645640[/snapback]

just a note - there is no such thing as "pentium duo core".

it's "core due". no "pentium" in it.

[Stalker]

This is really a great topic

 

Just want to have a special thanks for this:

 

 

If you want to have more tips and tricks setting up a perfect system, then go to:

 

http://www.musicxp.net/ this dude knows his shit

 

 

644752[/snapback]

 

This helped me a lot! Apsolutely cracy

 

so there you go, thanks again nemo

[NEMO.BOFH]

This is really a great topic

 

Just want to have a special thanks for this:

This helped me a lot! Apsolutely cracy

 

so there you go, thanks again nemo

646719[/snapback]

I am very happy I could help. I have actually compiled a lot of tips and tricks over the last years, and I will ask this guy if we can incorporate some of his stuff on our Techy site in the future The more sources, the better, right?

[reger]

just a note - there is no such thing as "pentium duo core".

it's "core due". no "pentium" in it.

646020[/snapback]

Pentium E2000

 

Google

 

oh and its core duo

[Zeyon]

I'm running a Raid, and my system seems to run better with it..

I think I will configure my next PC with the configuration mentioned above (I've also seen it stated numerous other places), with seperate physical drives for app's and samples.

[dharma lab]

anyone using raid?

645434[/snapback]

A true RAID ARAAY (and not just using a raid controller as extra channels for more hard drives, etc) involves doing the job with multiple drives. There are several different types of RAID, but essentially they provide 2 features:

1) BackUp- called Mirroring. Provides a continuous live backup.

2) Performance - called Striping. Have multiple hard drives do the job of 1, providing better performance.

 

 

I can get into a lot of really technical information, but to put it quite simply, I do not recommend RAID because:

 

1) In the end, real world performance for the type of work we do on a PC isn't going to increase that much. How often are you maxing out your hard drive read/write anyways. CPU power would be much more helpful. Only machines which are continuously reading & writing to drives (servers) really benefit.

 

2) If one of you striping RAID hard drives drops dead, guess what, you lose everything in that RAID array. If you setup a RAID array with both mirroring and striping,you'll eliminate that problem, but now you're talking about having at least 3 hard drives, but only have access to the capacity of 2 of them, and more complicated setup, and worse.

 

So, your $$ is much better spent buying a better processor than buying more hard drives & raid controllers. I would likewise suggest buying a 10,000 RPM drive rather than RAID. However, you should ALWAYS be backing everything important up, so make sure you have at least 2 hard drives. I find imaging software like Ghost a good balance of form & function.

[NEMO.BOFH]

A true RAID ARAAY (and not just using a raid controller as extra channels for more hard drives, etc) involves doing the job with multiple drives. There are several different types of RAID, but essentially they provide 2 features:

1) BackUp- called Mirroring. Provides a continuous live backup.

2) Performance - called Striping. Have multiple hard drives do the job of 1, providing better performance.

I can get into a lot of really technical information, but to put it quite simply, I do not recommend RAID because:

 

1) In the end, real world performance for the type of work we do on a PC isn't going to increase that much. How often are you maxing out your hard drive read/write anyways. CPU power would be much more helpful. Only machines which are continuously reading & writing to drives (servers) really benefit.

 

2) If one of you striping RAID hard drives drops dead, guess what, you lose everything in that RAID array. If you setup a RAID array with both mirroring and striping,you'll eliminate that problem, but now you're talking about having at least 3 hard drives, but only have access to the capacity of 2 of them, and more complicated setup, and worse.

 

So, your $$ is much better spent buying a better processor than buying more hard drives & raid controllers. I would likewise suggest buying a 10,000 RPM drive rather than RAID. However, you should ALWAYS be backing everything important up, so make sure you have at least 2 hard drives. I find imaging software like Ghost a good balance of form & function.

647217[/snapback]

I have been working with big raid arrays for many years, I run 2 raids here at home, and all I can say, if you aint running Raid 5 or 10, you shouldnt be running it. You will be in very big agony if your raid 0 or 1 fails.

 

I have 100 9gb scsi drives, I should so set up a raid 10 with 100 drives!

[Mike A]

Pentium E2000

 

Google

 

oh and its core duo

647137[/snapback]

omfg

i thought they dropped the pentium brand when they switched to conroe

 

and sorry about that typo

[Guest Schallusion]

Hi!

 

I wan't to reply this topic because because i had problems with lots of I/Os on harddisks, too. This happens if you have to freeze audio parts in the daw because of high cpu load. So the frozen audio parts have to been loaded from harddisk. Therefore not only the maximum Transferrate of an hdd is responsible for the performance. The number of i/os per second is very importaint, too.

 

So If you Split your System for example into a System hdd, Software hdd and Audio hdd, mostly the audio hdd is used. System hdd sometimes for virtual memory if your physical memory is not so much. same situation on the software hdd. It loads mainly the data when starting a program, then it runs mostly in the memory of your system.

 

One possibility is to split the audio data on different hdd or a raid system (raid systems are described below, so i don't do it again). But there is also another aspect to point out witch is often forgetten.

My colleague an me have the same raid configuration, but we have different performance. In some songs we have as many Layers frozen that there are so many i/os that sometimes the playback hangs while loading data on one pc. this pc has the raid controller connected via PCI 32 which has a max transferrate of ca. 133 MB/s but this is only a theoretical value. The max value is shared by all connected devices (raid controllers, sound card!, etc..) so the main problem isn't the hdd spped, it's the pci interface. on my pc there isn't this problem because the raid controller is connected via PCIe (express) which has a extremly higher data rate.

 

 

So finally my advice is:

-Use many disks to increase number of i/os per second. a raid system increases overall speed. if you use disks seperately you have to manage it for your own, for example mount physical disks to not to drive letters but to folders (in windows) otherwise use different mount points

-a new mainboard with PCIe or PCI 64 (Normally server or workstation boards) would help very much

-enough ram helps to reduce the i/os (my sys has 2 GB it's ok so you don't need virtual memory!!). for example some samples have the option to leave the samples in ram, so the only load them once!

-and last but not least a proper system an defragmentated hdd

 

greets, schallusion

[dharma lab]

all I can say, if you aint running Raid 5 or 10, you shouldnt be running it. You will be in very big agony if your raid 0 or 1 fails.

 

I have 100 9gb scsi drives, I should so set up a raid 10 with 100 drives!

647245[/snapback]

You've got that right, raid 5 or 10. Hehe, a 100 9GB scsi drives....I can only imagine the electricity bills & the noise (One of my SCSI drives used to sound like the jet engine in the Bat-Mobile)

 

but man, it would be fun just to see it work.

[CosmicEquilibrium]

Yeah SCSI for personal using should be very expensive and unnecessary... but if you already have it like that better for you lol, but sata 2 is sufficient with dual or quad core of pentium, because pentium are leading at the moment...