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optimal drive setup for sound recording?

M

mtdrew

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Aug 25, 2008
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I want to run protools in windows vista. I was thinking of getting 2 hard drives in a raid 0 config, and then a 3rd drive for vista, all 3 of them being WD5000AAKS (500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s). Is this a solid plan? If so, what raid controller would you recommend?

Thanks
 
No need for that. Single drive works great.
 
Hi, I have a home recording setup running Protools, and am using an OS drive and a 2nd drive for all music files. Although one drive will work, it helps to have the OS drive free to do it's thing while the music drive is writing the data you are recording. A 3rd drive is only useful if you are working with samples while you are recording. The 2 drive setup will help eliminate dropouts due to heavy disk usage.

I use an 80gb drive for my OS and a 500gb drive for music files. You should be fine with a smaller OS drive, as you won't be storing anything other than programs on it.

Don't use RAID! If you lose your array you will lose your music. You won't see any advantage from anything faster than a 7200 rpm drive when recording or mixing.

Have fun!
 
I'd agree with the above recommendations and most importantly screw the RAID concept. It's overcomplicated for no good reason, most single drives nowadays are ridiculously fast as it is so why bother.

Get plenty of RAM, get the drives set up individually as already mentioned and run with it. Not much else to do.
 
Sound bitrates, even at 24/192, are quite low. 24 bits * 192,000 samples/sec is only 600 KB/s or so, and most hard drives these days can write 60 MB/s sequentially. That means you have to push 100 streams of recording before a single disk becomes the limiting factor. Even in a more realistic limit-pushing scenario---say you're recording 6 drum tracks and playing the 20 tracks for the rest of the band that you've already recorded---you're not likely to be limited by the hard drive. Only really large setups would have to worry about disk bandwidth.
 
thanks guys saved me time & money!!! so my current understanding of raid is that it's really only useful if you're doing massive video editing...?
 
RAID definitely lends itself to video editing almost primarily, to be honest. Hardcore video workstations will almost always have hard drives in RAID setups, and RAID 0 tends to be the favorite because of the enhanced write speeds capable by the striping across multiple drives. It offers more bandwidth for writing so it's easier to "stream to disk" with live content.

But that was years ago, and now with HD content, some machines are definitely benefiting from RAID for video editing once again. The increased bandwidth requirements for full HD 1080 streams definitely chews it up fast.
 
RAID 0 is great for video editing. Especially if you're editing multiple streams of video.

If you've got 3 layers of video, the disk is having to play back 3 video files at the same time... accessing 3 files at once. So when you scrub the timeline back and forth, the disk has to be able to quickly access those files simultaneously... or else your system will bog down.

Luckily, I only edit MiniDV... so a single 7200 RPM drive is fine. But if you're editing huge HD files, a RAID will certainly be able to keep up.
 
MScrip said:
Luckily, I only edit MiniDV... so a single 7200 RPM drive is fine. But if you're editing huge HD files, a RAID will certainly be able to keep up.
Click to expand...

HDV files are the same size as minDV files.
 
just get two WD6400AAKS
one for OS and one for your music
No Raid.
 
Zepher said:
HDV files are the same size as minDV files.
Click to expand...

That is true... but they are compressed files. And if you have 2 or more layers if HDV files, that's a lot of decompression and processing going on. The drive has to be fast enough to keep up.
 
MScrip said:
That is true... but they are compressed files. And if you have 2 or more layers if HDV files, that's a lot of decompression and processing going on. The drive has to be fast enough to keep up.
Click to expand...

Actually, the processor needs to keep up, not the drive(s) with compressed HD.
If we are talking about uncompressed HD, then the drive speed is a major factor.

What program/hardware do you use? I just built a Matrox RT.X2 HD editing system which runs Premiere Pro CS3.
2 weeks ago while at a Video production conference in Orlando I won a copy of Edius.
I tried it out when I got home and am very impressed with it, it is much much better than Premiere.
I would prefer to use Edius but the Matrox card only works in Premiere. :(
 
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