Dual HD System for new DAW ???

[mark4man]

Was looking at GigaByte, Asus & Intel MoBo's over at Price Grabber, in hopes of custom building a new new digital audio workstation; & it looked to me like these new-tech boards (& their accompanying BIOS') only offered one IDE Channel.

[In the past (& on my current machine)...the best performance for PC based digital audio recording was to run the multitracking software (SONAR, Cubase, etc.) on the primary drive/channel; & utilize the secondary drive/channel for the recording & playback of audio data.]

Not knowing anything about RAID...I began looking into this; & found that all the new systems utilize SATA. But...how would the above dual drive channel scenario be accomplished? Are all SATA drives connected to one channel? Do I have to go to RAID for a system with two drives/channels? If I do...is that system more or less effeicient (than separate IDE channels) for the described use?

What should I do?

Thanks,

mark4man

 

[unhappy_mage]

The sata drives are one to a channel (except in more complicated scenarios with port multipliers and such - ignore these). So you could have your boot drive on channel 1 and your recording volume on channel 2, with a CD burner or whatever on the IDE channel.

My solution to this (a little pre-sata) was a pair of 27gb disks in raid 1 as a boot disk, and a pair of Seagate 7200.7s (120gb) in raid 1 for recording. Nowadays I'd go with Samsung drives, still in raid 1. If you can find an appropriate solid-state device (8gb flash or something) for a boot drive, that'd be even quieter. My goal for my next DAW is no moving parts. Wish me luck

Depending on how many channels/what rate, you may be able to record over network. It sounds like a terrible idea, I know, but that way you can have your big noisy server box in another room with plenty of room. Alternatively, get a small fast quiet disk to record onto and then move everything onto the network asap. That was what I was going to do, and then I had to go to college and leave all that behind. Oh well. I'll be back

 

[mark4man]

unhappy_mage...

Thanks.

Are the SATA channels throughputting data independently, like IDE (i.e., are they true channels)?

Thanks again,

mark4man

 

[unhappy_mage]

Yes. Each sata port has a full speed connection to the controller. Some motherboards may put the controller on the pci bus rather than directly on the north/southbridge, though, which means that the drives could talk to the controller at full speed, but the controller wouldn't be able to talk to the rest of the system at full speed. Either way, though, it's plenty fast. PCI only limits you to 133 MB/s, which is plenty fast for almost anything. If you were doing video editing, it might become an issue, but in the meantime it's plenty.

What kind of setup do you have? How many channels recording at once, bit depth/resolution? Curious minds want to know

 

[mark4man]

Some motherboards may put the controller on the pci bus rather than directly on the north/southbridge

What do I look for in the specs to be able to determine that?

What kind of setup do you have? How many channels recording at once, bit depth/resolution?

SONAR XL 2.2 w/ an Echo Audio Layla 24/96. Current CD project; basic tracks recorded at 16/44.1 [don't ask...most were ancient; & recorded onto an old DAT machine at my guitarist's studio, transferred to a Fostex digital multitracker; & uploaded into my box (see below) at my studio.] Later on he grabbed a decent PC & SONAR; & so the last song on the CD is 24/96.

Most of the projects are around 50 tracks (including comps)...but we normally only record 1 or two at a time (we're more of a "studio" band than anything else.)

Thanks,

mark4man

Dell Dimension 8250 / Windows XP
Intel 850E Motherboard/Chipset
Intel P4 2.53GHz CPU (512 KB L2 Cache, 533 MHz FSB)
1024 MB PC1066 RDRAM
Ultra 60GB Primary HD / Single Volume (OS, Apps, Files/Folders.)
Maxtor DiamondMax 9+ 80GB Secondary HD / Single Volume (Audio Data only)
nVidia 64MB GEFORCE4 MX420 AGP
Echo Audio Layla 24/96 PCI Audio Interface
Universal Audio UAD-1 DSP Powered Plug-In System
KRK Rockit RP-8 Studio Reference Monitors
SONAR XL 2.2
SONAR4
WaveLab 5

 

[unhappy_mage]

You'll have to dig fairly deep for this, unfortunately; find the motherboard diagram and it'll tell you. Some manufacturers won't include one with their board; I tend to avoid them, no telling what surprises are built in to their boards.

And now I'm trying to find an example of a motherboard with a diagram in its manual and failing miserably. This had better not be a trend. If you do find one, it'll be fairly obvious (I can post screenshots if this next part makes no sense) - the sata ports will be shown connected to either the PCI bus or to the northbridge.

But like I said, it doesn't really matter all that much. What you might want to look into, though, would be an AMD chip and a corresponding motherboard. The design of AMD's stuff right now is just out of sight compared to Intel's stuff, as much as it pains a longtime Intel guy to say that. My next box will be AMD.