Fastest hard drives?

Hard drive speed only comes into play when you are recording/playing back many simultaneous tracks at a high bit-depth and sample rate. For reference, my laptop's internal HD - which is about as slow as it comes - was able to record 9 simultaneous tracks at 24/44.1. I have not reached the recording limit of my AMD64 4400+ with Maxtor 250GB SATA drives.

SATA can be faster than SCSI with a powerful enough CPU. SATA, like ATA & IDE, depends on the host CPU for many of the operations that are built into a SCSI drive, which is why there is such a big difference in price.

SCSI is an absolute waste of Money for Audio.

maybe, just maybe if your recording @192 and boatloads of tracks you might need it.

Sata1 and Sata2 so far have have show no differance.

Scott
ADK

Ok. How about, can I use a SATA2 drive in a motherboard which only supports SATA1? I mean, SATA2 drives seem to be similarly priced that SATA1, so if there's better availability in store with the SATA2s, can I go with that and use it even though the motherboard wouldn't support it (i.e. use it with the SATA1 drive's specs, of course).

Also, what about 16mb cache, is that helping? The 8mb seems to be pretty much standard now, but is there any use for the 16mb?

Ok, so 8mb is fine for audio.

What about streaming samples from disc, would the 16mb cache help that?

Aren't the Raptors Western Digitals'?

Get a seagate....they have a 5 year replacement, all others are 1 or 3 years.

Uh, I have to drop a brick on this discussion. The person who said that SCSI is inappropriate for audio is dead wrong. SCSI systems are less cpu dependent, which is always good in these days of host based processing/synths etc. They also tend to be faster in terms of buss speed and throughput. They allow for up to 7 (or 14) devices per interface (depending). Shure you may not hit the limit while recording 16 tracks of 24 bit/192, but it is always nice to have headroom no? I think with the advent of 64bit computer music we will be chewing through that faster than ever! SCSI is more reliable. SCSI drives are built for servers, and 24/7/365 operability. Anyone who has been doing computer music for few years has probably had a corrupted file. SCSI is just better at this not happening. Also most SCSI drives have 5yr warranty instead of the consumer level ata and sata drives which offer 1 or 3 years or even 90 days. Not that I've ever tried to RMA a drive but this belies the confidence the manufacturers have in their products.
RE SATA
SATA2 is backwards compatible with SATA1. SATA is almost as fast as SCSI. Cons? Scsi interfaces or mobos with it built in cost a lot. SCSI raid costs way too much. My solution is to use relatively small scsi drives, and save to DVDram weekly. This forces me to backup more often than my slovenly habits would otherwise allow.

me personally I run multiple multiple drives on different interfaces. SCSI for audio data, sata for system/programs, pata for optical drives DVD ram, CDR etc. Also, I have my drives in a mirrored raid for system and data.

They allow for up to 7 (or 14) devices per interface (depending).

My host adapter only takes one ID. I can have 15 other devices.

Raid 5, I believe is interleaved data with parity info over a minmum of 3 disks. I have never understood why 3 disks.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel5-c.html
one advantage of raid 5 that actually has nothing to do with it is that most raid 5 contollers use little or no CPU overhead. Compared to the "raid" controllers on consumer/enthusiast boards, which have no native x-oring capability. As the fellow with the Douglas Adams moniker pointed out, it is pricey, Like $150-500 for the controller card alone, then the price of 3-5 drives.

Regarding fast drives, Toms did a roundup recently. The Raptors are still tops with Hitachis T7K250 coming up a close 2nd.
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/index.html


edited for general sloppiness of typing

ORIGINAL: mashedbuddha

SCSI RAID 5 on a caching controller; yeilds 16 simultaneous recording tracks of 24/96 data @ approx 12% host CPU usage, and I've pushed it up to playing 60 tracks while recording 4 more.

What's the advantage to using RAID 5 over RAID 0+1 besides less expensive (3 drives instead of 4)?

the capacity of RAID 5 (striping with distributed parity) is N+1 ie: (3) 36GB drives yield a 72GB volume, (4) 36 GB drives yield a 108GB volume, and there is no theoretical limit to the total number of drives (minimum is 3). RAID 1+0 must begin with 4, and the total volume is 1/2 the sum of the drives ie: (4) 36GB drives = 72GB. 1+0 can be more than 4 drives, but must always be built in pairs. Bear in mind I'm talking about SCSI drives, here, where the single SCSI cable can have 15 drives on it. If you have RAID on PATA, then you get max 2 drives per cable; if it's SATA then you get one drive per cable.

The real reason I use SCSI RAID 5 is because I already have the hardware - salvaged from a dead server. I would not recommend buying it for a DAW - it's too expensive. Great Skull is correct - the Raptor is the way to go. BTW they are WD Enterprise drives (notice how the capacity is that of a SCSI drive? 36, 73, next will be 145) and have a 5 year warranty

Hold on to your Butts:

SAS

"The first generation of these products will deliver full-duplex performance at 3 Gb/sec. The next generation of SAS promises 6 Gb/sec throughput."

A few companies make a SATAII hard drive with a 16mb buffer - which is probably 99% as fast as a raptor with up to 500GB capacity per drive.