To RAID or not to RAID....

[Darien J]

I am in the process of buying the parts for my new machine (AMD 64 x2 4600+ & Asus A8v Deluxe mobo) and having a little difficulty in deciding what the best hard drive set up is. I have ordered an 80gb Sata drive for OS and programs and I will buy a dedicated external drive for back-up.

If I buy 2 x 250gb 7200rpm Sata drives would it be better to set them up in a raid 0 array and have both my projects and samples stored there or should I keep the drives seperate as on my current (IDE drive) machine?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

D

[itsplayed]

IMHO, keep them seperated. You won't gain much by doing so. Your better served in using one for samples and the other for audio. I didn't realize that the Asus A8v Deluxe can still be found. Why not go for a Core 2 Duo build instead? It is king in the single socket solution for a DAW. What music App. are you running with?

[TimOBrien]

RAIDs used to be the "big thing" because sub-Gigahertz computers were too slow to stream audio and video tracks without them. Now, RAIDS just increase the complexity of the system without much benefit.

Sound-on-Sound magazine did an article last year and found that RAIDs only give 10-15% more performance that is just not neccesary because a standard 7200rpm drive can already stream upwards of a hundred tracks.

Separate your drives:

C: OS and applications
D: Audio projects
E: Samples

[Darien J]

IMHO, keep them seperated. You won't gain much by doing so. Your better served in using one for samples and the other for audio. I didn't realize that the Asus A8v Deluxe can still be found. Why not go for a Core 2 Duo build instead? It is king in the single socket solution for a DAW. What music App. are you running with?

I bought an A8v Deluxe 2nd hand as I'm not looking to explore PCI Express yet and will be using my current PCI soundcard and my Matrox dual head AGP card for the time-being too. I've been running a 2Ghz Amd for 3 years or so now and have been very pleased with the performance (relatively speaking). I was also hoping to keep the cost down.

I'm running Ableton Live 6 for composition, arranging and mixdown, SX3 for premastering (and some mixing).

[Darien J]

RAIDs used to be the "big thing" because sub-Gigahertz computers were too slow to stream audio and video tracks without them. Now, RAIDS just increase the complexity of the system without much benefit.

Sound-on-Sound magazine did an article last year and found that RAIDs only give 10-15% more performance that is just not neccesary because a standard 7200rpm drive can already stream upwards of a hundred tracks.

Separate your drives:

C: OS and applications
D: Audio projects
E: Samples

Thanks that's very helpful mate.

I'm getting close to filling my current 250gb IDE samples drive and was thinking of doubling that for my new samples drive so....

do you reckon it'd be better to get another small (80gb?) Audio drive AND a 500gb Data drive? If so, any recommendations on a brand for the larger drive? I've been looking at the Seagate Barracuda. Would 3 drives be excessive (and noisy) and just partitioning the larger drive be a better option?

[passerby3141]

I believe the whole point of using separate drives is to decrease the workload of each drive. Using a separate partition on the same drive would most likely do nothing for performance, and make your drive selection more confusing as well. Using separate drives for audio, OS, and samples, increases the performance of the whole system, because each drive has a dedicated purpose, and the system calls on each drive for just that one use.

BTW, I'm glad you asked this question, I was about to myself!

[TimOBrien]

Exactly. Dedicate the drive and spread the workload.

Correct - partitioning does NOT do anything for you.
Partitioning splits up the drive into separate regions. Unfortunately, the time it takes for the mechanical arm to move from partition to partition is INCREDIBLY slow by computer standards and if it has to go back-and-forth repeatedly, your PC will slow down and bits of the audio stream can be dropped. Clicks, pops and dropouts are NOT good.

Personally, I'm using a Glyph firewire drive for audio (DEAD SILENT, fast and rack-mounted! Well worth a few extra pennies.) But I'm also using a Seagate USB2/Firewire drive for video editing. It is much noisier than the Glyph but a good drive so far. I don't think you can go wrong with a Seagate or a WesternDigital.