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Samples direct from disk or page file?

Hey guys,

Do most samplers (ie. Battery) and DAW programs (ie. Cubase) stream audio samples directly from the disk or do they load them into the page file and read them from there?

The reason I ask, is that I am building a new PC purely for production and I want to work out the optimum hard drive setup. What I am planning for at the moment is:

1. 36gb WD Raptor: Windows & programs
2. 36gb WD Raptor: Page file & scratch disk
3. 160gb WD Caviar: Everything else (all recorded audio, samples, project files, preset banks)

If samples are read directly from disk I would be better off with something like...
1. 36gb WD Raptor: Windows, programs, page file, scratch disk
2. 36gb WD Raptor: Samples, preset banks
3. 160gb WD Caviar: Project files, all recorded audio

Thanks.

As I said on MSN tiger, I've heard Raptors get pretty loud.

quote:

Originally posted by deceptikon As I said on MSN tiger, I've heard Raptors get pretty loud.

I checked the stats, theyre 1db louder than Caviars

I'm getting an Antec SOLO case as well, which suspends the hard drives in elastic. Should cut the noise down a bit. Getting fanless PSU, fanless video and an 800rpm S-Flex 120mm fan for a Scythe Ninja CPU heatsink. Should be bareable.

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm I checked the stats, theyre 1db louder than Caviars I'm getting an Antec SOLO case as well, which suspends the hard drives in elastic. Should cut the noise down a bit. Getting fanless PSU, fanless video and an 800rpm S-Flex 120mm fan for a Scythe Ninja CPU heatsink. Should be bareable.

Few of the Antec cases have some nice retention systems for hard drives, just voltmod all your fans to slow em down and clean the dust out of the box regularly, should go alright. When you hear a Raptor reading or writing data the first few times it scares you abit but yeah shit happens. Lol.

unless you are using large sample librairies like East West orchestra or Ivory... , your hardrive isn't going to be a determining factor of how well your system runs. As long as you have a relatively new hardrive , it will be sufficient.

Making trance is extremely light as far as hardrives are concerned. When i was into EDM a few years ago , i was bouncing every channel to audio then mixing. So 30 channels of stereo audio at 48khz 22 bit and it didn't tax the hardrives at all.

If you decide to use big librairies , i would personally just use raid configurations to get faster speeds from your drives.

Erm, applications don't have the option of loading something directly into a pagefile. If you're running low on physical memory and you load up a big sample then it *might* get paged, but that's still not guaranteed. The app is just loading something into memory, and whether or not the pagefile is used is up to the OS.

Most samplers will give you the option of loading samples into memory or streaming them from disk. In Battery, you set this up at the cell level (the "DFD" button).

P.S. Good specs there. That's more or less what my next setup is going to look like. Although, why bother with a 160 GB drive when 500 GB drives are so cheap? Samples are big!

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Erm, applications don't have the option of loading something directly into a pagefile. If you're running low on physical memory and you load up a big sample then it *might* get paged, but that's still not guaranteed. The app is just loading something into memory, and whether or not the pagefile is used is up to the OS. Most samplers will give you the option of loading samples into memory or streaming them from disk. In Battery, you set this up at the cell level (the "DFD" button). P.S. Good specs there. That's more or less what my next setup is going to look like. Although, why bother with a 160 GB drive when 500 GB drives are so cheap? Samples are big!

Cool, thanks for that!

I chose 160 over higher ones for two reasons... Firstly, because I'm currently on a 60gb hard drive (everything, incl. windows) and ive got 40gb free lol. Secondly, because I'm a cheap ass.

160gb of samples is a lot of samples! I have my old pc here still with a 500gb hard drive, which holds all my mp3s etc. so I figured I'd go minimalist with this one.

Don't quote me on this, but doesn't each HDD/partition have it's own page file?

Therefore if your DAW is on one partition, a separate partition/hdd for a page file won't do anything as it will use the page file on the partition/hdd that the DAW is installed on. I'm not sure if you can specify for it to use a page file on a separate page file/hdd?

As for Battery 3, as Digi mentioned it has some nice built in features. One of the best ones is where you can train it to learn what samples to use, and then tell it to clear the unused ones from it's temporary memory. Let me know if you want to know how to do this

quote:

Originally posted by Fledz Don't quote me on this, but doesn't each HDD/partition have it's own page file?

Nope, pagefile is set for the entire system. You could have a page file on every partition but that would be unwise. Pagefiles cause your filesystem to get fragmented to hell. So it's often a good idea to have a blank partition with nothing on it other than the page file, so it can stew in its own filth hehe.

quote:

Originally posted by Fledz As for Battery 3, as Digi mentioned it has some nice built in features. One of the best ones is where you can train it to learn what samples to use, and then tell it to clear the unused ones from it's temporary memory. Let me know if you want to know how to do this

I'd be interested to know this!

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm Pagefiles cause your filesystem to get fragmented to hell.

Not exactly. If you configure the pagefile as system-managed, then the resizing can cause fragmentation. If you've got a good amount of memory then you don't need to (and probably shouldn't) set this option. Just set your pagefile to exactly 1.5x the amount of physical memory and don't permit resizing.

Now, the pagefile itself can get fragmented, and it's very difficult to defragment (just defrag won't cut it, you actually have to disable/rehome the pagefile which involves a few reboots). Although this is an issue under any circumstances so you should check the PF once in a while to make sure.

Nevertheless it is a good idea to have a separate drive for pagefile/swap file/scratch space. This is ONLY if it's actually a separate physical drive, it will do you no good to just have a separate partition for it.

I'd still recommend a bigger drive for samples if you're planning to start using a lot of those. Maybe you just mean drum samples or something, in which case 160 might be fine... but I got a 250 GB drive for samples a while back and it's already starting to fill up. One of the piano samples alone is almost 3 gigs. The Spectrasonics packs like Atmosphere and Trilogy come on 3 CDs each. It all adds up...

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