choosing a HD, and getting a good setup

[imotic]

time to buy a new HD, and i want to make sure i do it right. I'm thinking about going for an ATA100 7200rpm 100GB HD with 8mb cache... but if you think I should go higher or lower for best price/performance, let me know, this is by no means set in stone.

I suppose my current specs are somewhat relevant, as well as intended use. Currently, I have:
Gigabyte GA-7DXR motherboard (http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Products/Products_GA-7DXR.htm)
Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz
M-Audio Delta 44 soundcard
IBM Deskstar 60GXP ATA/100 40GB HD
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 Ultra ATA 66 20GB HD
Crucial 512 MB ECC DDR RAM

I was given some rounded ribbon cables as a gift; I was able to track down the URL of where they were bought from ( http://www.thinkgeek.com/clearance/37ef/ ), but I'm not sure what the throughput speed of them is (I'm currently waiting for an email back from thinkgeek on this subject).

if there are any other relevant specs necessary, please let me know.

the motherboard is limited to ATA100 speed, so I guess that rules out anything faster as far as the HD is concerned. The board has promise onboard RAID; I've heard a lot of positive and negative comments on RAID. As my fastest HD right now is 40GB and this is not enough storage space for me, I wouldn't want to limit my HD space, and I wouldn't want to hurt performance either. What do you think I should do as far as RAID is concerned? If I use RAID, I can have one RAID pair of HDs and at most 2 other HDs. If I don't use RAID, it seems I can have at most 4 HDs. Is this correct?

Right now, I've got both my hard drives on the same ribbon cable, and a CDRW as well as a DVD drive on the other ribbon cable. Neither of the RAID controllers are in use. Would it be better to put the HDs on different ribbon cables/IDE controllers?

as far as HDs go, I've got a slight bias. The only Western Digital drive I've owned went seriously south on me a few years back. The Maxtor drive has treated me really well, better than the IBM drive (although not as quiet as the IBM drive during heavy read/write). So I'd be slightly weary of going with a WD drive unless someone can point to some reputable source saying that the drives are really reliable.

As far as intended usage goes, I'll be doing some audio multitracking work with Cakewalk SONAR, recording as many as 2 simultaneous tracks and playing back as many as 15 simultaneous tracks. For non-audio work, I'll also be doing some light gaming, and compiling sourcecode (though that's probably trivial).

Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated; thanks so much for your time.

[This message has been edited by imotic (edited 01-23-2004).]

[bubba freaktree]

right now i'm liking seagate drives...

[habibbijan]

I agree. I like Seagate drives because they tend to be a little quieter than WD or Maxtor, at least concerning the drives that I've owned. Right now I have both a WD "Special Edition" and a Seagate in my DAW, and the WD drowns out the Seagate in noise comparison.

I've never owned an IBM drive, but I've heard terrible things about their reliability in the past. The "Deskstar" was suitably coined the "Deathstar".

I've never had RAID in my DAW, and don't know that I would. Reliability is key for me. I hate the thought of losing all data if one drive goes south in RAID 0, and I'd also hate to "waste" an extra drive in RAID 1. I would go with Serial ATA before IDE RAID.

[imotic]

if I were to go with a seagate, then, i might end up getting the 120GB drive (http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/uata/uata120.html)... a drive with 8mb cache, 7200rpm, & ATA/100 is probably my requirement at the moment. the seagate is advertised as a really quiet drive, which would be great.

does platter size figure into anything, and does this make larger/smaller drives faster/slower?

thanks for the suggestions.. if anyone has any further suggestions, i'm still looking to get a good rounded opinion.

[Zenith]

the only thing that makes a difference with the platter size is if you are acessiong files on the inside and the outside... stuff on the outside will be read faster than on the inside so if your platter is larger the stuff on the outside is going to be read faster. also if you have 2 files to be acessed one on the outside, one on the inside.. the seek time will be higher with a larger platter..

[imotic]

I ended up going for that seagate. it arrives monday or tuesday, i imagine it should be a great drive from the reviews i've read of it thus far. thanks all for the help.

[Mab]

I just built a pc using two 80gig SATA drives. They are Hitachi formerly IBM and I am pleased. I went with SATA and am pretty happy I did.

[korz]

I've got two Maxtor drives in my Audio PC, a 60G and an 80G. They have liquid bearings and are super quiet! I'm really happy with them. I think my power supply fan may be louder than my HDs. I have the box under my desk and honestly, I can't really tell if it's on or not when the monitor goes into sleep mode.

Al.

[KX]

I have 2 IBM (40 & 80g) 7200/100
and 3 Maxtor (80 80 & 120) in my audio
computer. Satisfied since 1 1/2 year.

[imotic]

now i have 3 HDs installed. my main drive where xp is installed is 120gb, 7200rpm, 8mb cache. after that, i have a 40gb 7200rpm 2mb cache and a 20gb 7200rpm 2mb cache. conventional wisdom tells me to put the audio files on a seperate drive, but the only drive with an 8mb cache is the main drive... i'm wondering which drive i should put my audio files for sonar on? does partition type (ntfs, fat32, etc) or partition size matter?

[pcstudioconnect]

This is heartbreaking a good deal of you guys are turning your machines into wharehouses not production units. I build and configurer studios for a living and I hate to see this. In regards to teh 1st post how are you going to partition this drive. Is your os going to be on the new drive, and if not what about DDO. Big safety concerns raised by this alone.

Imotic's ? I liked a lot. I know some of you won't like this response but it's ridiculous to even have those 2mb cache hd on your system. If you truly need that much storage by a old P3 on Craiglist for 2 bills put them in there and park the anything tht is not accessed daily on it. Access via a router when needed. (the seek times won't matter if it;'s not constantly used.Otherwise they are killing your system.
If any of you are in the Bay Area or La I'd be glad to give you some help. Email me if you like. I've built over 50 cpus for music use only and I've made almost all the mistakes. I could probably steer you away from a lot of them.

[KX]

With soft sampler, it is common to have a 200gig library that has to be accessed very often at fast rate. Then you need space to record audio... I don't think 180gig
is gonna make a warehouse computer.

Partition format type doesn't matter
as long as your OS and app support it.


[This message has been edited by KX (edited 02-28-2004).]

[imotic]

thanks, kx.

i still have this question, though: where should i put my audio files? on the same hd as my OS (which has the larger cache), on a different hd on the same ribbon cable, or on a hd on a different ribbon cable? (again, the HD running my OS has 8mb cache, the other two have 2mb cache.)

[KX]

I don't know what XP requires as cache.
As far as I know, when your sequencing
program is running, recording and sampleplayback excepted, "everything" mostly runs from RAM so I do think 2mo of cache is enough. I would save the 8mo disk for audio
and sofsampler only, using a smaller drive for prog and OS.
You may want to partition 120 into 2X60.

To know wich drive to use, I used SiSoftSandra to benchtest my IDE
performance and I simply chose the fastest.
It took me about a day to try different settings and now everything is quite stable and fast.


[This message has been edited by KX (edited 02-28-2004).]

[+Erik.+]

It's certainly trendy to have the 8mb cache. I am running 3 of them. It's not worth buying a new hard disc with 2mb cache when 8mb cache is only a few bucks more.

But at the end of the day, I don't think there's many people who can put their hands up and tell me the performance difference they have noticed without going to toms hardware site to find out what SHOULD be happening.

[+Erik.+]

Originally posted by pcstudioconnect:
[B]. I know some of you won't like this response but it's ridiculous to even have those 2mb cache hd on your system.

you are right, we don't like it as it's your usual rubbish http://www.audioforums.com/forums/biggrin.gif