Having a nice fast hard drive is really great.

We tracked 16 channels of 96kHz 24bit on one of our 10,000RPM Raptors. No hiccups.

While not entirely necessary, having drives with fast RPM is really great for multi-track recording, and for fast project load times.

My next build will have (2) 150GB Raptors in RAID-0, and (4) 1TB drives in RAID-5.



EDIT:

Also let's just compare approximately sized 10,000RPM vs SSD... just look at the price difference. Stick with spindle HDs for a while:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233087 330 bucks

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136296 180 bucks

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Last edited by wrzonance on Jul-17-2009 at 18:29

Hi, one of the things I do at my job is testing the 10kRPM WD Raptors versus 7200RPM drives on various platforms with various processors. I can tell you that though 10k is faster, you are paying a huge premium for not that much better performance (I'd disclose numbers, but that would get me fired ) If you're concerned with performance, wait for solid-state drives to really kick in to gear.

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I don't get the fascination with raid and it's kind of redundant in a studio environment. Raid will only help with data safeguarding not really performance (in the traditional speed sense) it just means that the data has an extra level of protection. In any studio I've even been to the drives are immediately backed up following a session and most back up to another drive, as well as tape.

quote:

Originally posted by DJ RANN I don't get the fascination with raid and it's kind of redundant in a studio environment. Raid will only help with data safeguarding not really performance (in the traditional speed sense) it just means that the data has an extra level of protection. In any studio I've even been to the drives are immediately backed up following a session and most back up to another drive, as well as tape.

Yea, remember people RAID IS NOT BACKUP

Its for up time and to make sure there is no immediate and total failure of data.

If you are having disk bandwidth issues in projects, adding more disks will help.

You then split your project across the drives; some tracks on drive 1, others on drive 2, etc.

Yes, RAID0 or RAID0+1 is likely to increase disk bandwidth, possibly enough to satisfy your needs, but adds complication... and in the case of RAID0, a level of disaster danger.

Simply adding more disks and splitting your tracks across the disks is fairly foolproof and easy enough to do in most DAW applications.

Some DAW applications also allow you to configure a seperate "scratch" drive; the drive the application uses to store temporary data. This disk will get hit during bounce or audio processing/modification operations, depending on your work style and project goal. Remember that mixing read and write operations, especially to different files (IE: writing to a temporary file while reading some other file) drastically reduces the throughput of your disk. This is also important to remember when you are configuring your project; try to keep tracks that will be written to often on different disks, while keeping "read only" material on other disks. This is, of course, very much dependent on your work style and project goal. If it all possible, configure your software to use a completely separate "scratch" disk. If you are doing things that pound a scratch disk on a regular basis, you might consider using either a software or hardware ramdisk. In some situations, this can make a significant difference, although this seems to be more prominent on video editing workloads than with audio production/processing.

... Just a few thoughts.