3 HDs: Where to place OS, Software, Samples and Audio?

Setup: It's in my signature. basically 3 different HDs(from older,slower,smaller to bigger,newer,faster). Uses: I use my DAW to record jazz/funk/rock sometimes I like to play with a lot of VSTs on top, Bust mostly it's just several tracks of audio, mostly guitars and such with Superior Drummer and some Keyboard or bass VST. Questions: 1) The basic question is: on which drive should I place my OS, Software(plugins) Samples. Audio & Projects etc... 2) I think that most of the heavy use is porbebly VST(I might be wrong though) and my questions is how does the RAM and HD work? 'cause I know VSTs are loaded to the RAM, so maybe having the samples on a fast drive will just shorten Loading time and not make "Working Time" smoother and I should use the faster HD for audio, but does the audio load to the vst? Thanks in advance.

Jim answered your drive location question. As for VSTs loading samples, that depends on the VST. Some load samples into memory and other stream samples from the hard drive. All the synths that come with SONAR just load samples, so you can put those samples anywhere. If you have other VSTs that stream samples, those samples should go on the E drive, like Jim suggested.

Scott

--
Scott R. Garrigus - http://garrigus.com - SONAR X2 Power! - http://garrigus.com/?SonarX2Power
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Sound Forge Power book series: http://garrigus.com/?PowerBooks
* Author of the Cakewalk Sonar ProAudioTutor video tutorial series: http://garrigus.com/?ProAudioTutor
* Publisher of the DigiFreq free music technology newsletter: http://digifreq.com/?DigiFreq
* Publisher of the NewTechReview free consumer technology newsletter: http://newtechreview.com/?NewTechReview

Oops... you got the really smart dudes here already. Listen to them. ;-p

Personally I would partition the 1tb drive into 3 partitions rather than use the three drives looking at the spec. Don't put the OS on the green drive (bad idea!), definitely put it on the 1tb drive. Invest in a backup solution, maybe your other hard drives will come in useful for this or when your 1tb drive gets full.

CakeAlexS


Personally I would partition the 1tb drive into 3 partitions rather than use the three drives looking at the spec. Don't put the OS on the green drive (bad idea!), definitely put it on the 1tb drive. Invest in a backup solution, maybe your other hard drives will come in useful for this or when your 1tb drive gets full.

Whaaa? No, don't partition. It's gonna have to constantly be trying to retrieve/write data from multiple spots on the drive. Bad idea.

Seriously if you can scrape up some extra dough get another smaller 7200 RPM HDD to put your OS and software on. Doesn't even have to be all that big. The main program doesn't take up a lot of space. It's all the samples and stuff that eat up the drive space and you can put that on the other drives anyway. It's worth dropping the extra $60-100 for another Caviar Black.

I just did a search on the model number for the 160GB drive. It seems to be saying it is 10 000 RPMs. If that is true using that as your OS/Sonar drive, the 1TB as your audio and samples drive would probably be the best way to go and use the Green for backup and bulk storage. I use two drives in this style config and it's fine.

I use two drives in this style config and it's fine.

 
If the samples are being loaded/streamed from RAM, the two drive approach won't affect performance.
If you trying to pull 128 notes of disk-streaming polyphony... AND... run 64 channels of audio, that's when you want a dedicated 3rd HD for disk-streaming sample libraries.  That's too much load for a single conventional HD.

Oh and I have 16GB of DDR3 so that helps. Apparently I could expand the system to have 32GB if I wanted. That would be SICK! lol

;-)

At some point I have to figure out why my E drive keeps falling asleep on me. I thought I had disable all the power management stuff but the darn thing decides to take a nap if I don't manipulate the audio for a while. Makes it take a few seconds to start playback  and sometimes causing the audio engine to stop if I make an action too quickly after it wakes up.

Once I get a good back up drive I'm going to image the system as well as make  regular back up of all my project files then completely wipe the system and start from scratch. Hopefully I'll be able to afford a bare drive to toss in my cage in the next couple months.

To be honest with a modern computer and a fastish hard drive you can run the whole lot on a single partition/single fast hard drive without much issue. However having partitions reduces fragmentation of key files, and makes your backup strategy easier, plus it can speed up access, that is specifically in a single hard drive scenario. Looking at the speed and size of the other hard drives I would still recommend using the primary hard drive only for day to day work. Yes another faster hard drive to store data would be a better idea. A third hard drive somewhat overboard but you can never have enough hard drives. Personally I use four, but I actually only use two. I mirror my hard drives.

In my recent build I have opted for a 120Gb Samsung SSD as my C: drive for the OS & Programs, and as a second drive for everything else, a 1Tb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 64MB Cache SATA3 Hard Drive.
My only concern is that some people say the SSD's wear out after a while, but that may be heresay.

> Fragmentation on a modern file system like the ones used by Vista, Windows 7 and 8 are not as much of a concern as they once were.
 
That is the Microsoft line, they are assuming you are defragging automatically once a month and there is code to optimize the position of some software such as the bootloader and all the software that went with it (that's why XP booted so much faster than Windows 2000). Note this is from a company who said that fragmentation didn't exist at all with NTFS (with NT 3.5), only with FAT (even though there were third party apps out at the time that would defrag NTFS). Including a defragger in the next release soon killed that line. Nope file systems still do get fragmented, yes not as much as FAT but enough to be a concern esp with DAW applications in my view.
 
NB there are no moving parts in a SD card, so sure, for this fragmentation is not an issue.

@LordElpus... I avoided SSDs for the reported failure problems (and cost) but the newer ones are supposedly becoming more reliable. I'd make sure you do regular back ups though anyway just in case. I find it's easy to get swayed by outdated information when researching stuff online. For example there were a TON of complaints about the interface I bought and bad drivers which kind of turned me off. After digging around and checking dates on posts/articles though I found out that all those problems had been solved and I couldn't be happier with it. Basically keep in mind that in the computer world things move ridiculously fast sometimes so it's best to check dates on everything you read. If you see a bunch of complaints but they are tagged 6-12 months ago and everything since then is touting how great the thing is something may have been updated/changed/etc...

In fact another perfect example is Sonar X1. I read an ENORMOUS amount of complaints mostly coming from this forum but after digging in a little further I realized the bulk of those were coming from the X1c days and earlier. X1d comments were mostly very good... even if there were far less of them and that was because people tend not to take to the internet to freak out so much when things are going smoothly.

Trying to deal with modern tech is very interesting beyond just the hardware/bits/bytes/drivers/software/whatever... there is a very human element that comes into play. After all... humans are the ones using all this crap and we are certainly odd beasts.

;-)