s_barber
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Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
I have a Dell Laptop Pentium M 1.7 Ghz., XP Pro with 1 GB RAM and 5400 RPM 80 GB Hard Drive. Will the laptop and 5400 RPM drive be enough horsepower to run Sonar 5 Producer? I'm planning to use firewire to drive an M-Audio or Echo Firewire interface 8-10 channel or something comparable. I see they recommend a 7400 RPM HD. I don't expect to go track crazy but expect to use a fair amount of plug ins and effects. Anyone have ideas or experience with this?
Used to run Cakewalk 2.0 DOS on a 286 years(eons?) ago. This will be a real techology jump but don't want to buy the SW if the goose won't fly.
Thanks in advance.
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tunekicker
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/03 20:56:34
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You will have a lower track count and higher disk usage faster than someone with a 7400 RPM drive, but it should work. I would recommend getting an external drive in the near future, though. You'll want one that is firewire and USB2.0 compatible. This way you can use it to transport data, back things up, etc. It will have faster performance than the 5400rpm Drive. I've also found that I get better disk performance out of my firewire drive when using a firewire interface (which is what you say you are interested in.) An all around great investment if you have the cash. Remember to enable DMA on your drive if you're using anything but SATA drives (See your drive's properties in your Device Manager.) Otherwise, you won't get much of anything to run well.
Peace,
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Guest
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/03 20:58:23
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5400 rpm is going to be a problem .. unless you're running very small projects
(1 to 4 tracks).
jeff
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Abelardo
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/03 21:54:19
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Your drive is not that slow, most external drives will be slower (even 7200rpm 3.5inch). You can download and run hdtune http://www.hdtune.com and see what figures you get. External USB2 drives will max out at about 25MB/s I guess your drive will be faster than that.
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Guest
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/03 23:05:53
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i beg to differ Abelardo .. i use Sonar, Vegas, SoundForge, Acid, Project5, and Protools on my laptop. Without exception, they have problems with my 5400 RPM drive for large projects. Moving the same projects off to either a Firewire or USB2 drive cures the problem for two reasons: 1. The laptop internal drive is used for application, operating system, SWAP and audio streaming 2. 5400 RPM combined with the slow access times for many laptop drives exacerbates the problem. theoretically, a 5400 RPM could keep up with audio stream *alone* .. but this is hardly a typical scenario for DAW or multimedia applications. given my experience doing live tracking in the bay area, i'm not alone .. without exception, everyone who i've seen doing live tracking has a dedicated 7500 or above firewire drives. my attempts to use the internal drive for multitrack projects have all been failures .. even with magic and smelling salts applied. jeff ps: be wary of hdtune.com .. my spyware and pop-up blocker went off on this site.
post edited by jmarkham - 2006/02/03 23:12:41
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sojourn
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 00:21:42
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How much ram does you laptop have jeff? If it is a 32 bit system with win xp. Load it up with 2 gig. (The Max) I bet it would run just fine with a 5400 rpm drive. However, it would probably be cheaper to buy a faster drive. JMO
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Guest
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 01:53:20
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ORIGINAL: sojourn
How much ram does you laptop have jeff? If it is a 32 bit system with win xp. Load it up with 2 gig. (The Max) I bet it would run just fine with a 5400 rpm drive. However, it would probably be cheaper to buy a faster drive. JMO
i have 1gig on mine .. and i know what you're suggesting .. less paging due to more physical memory and larger file map and memory map windows .. but ... you'll hit a wall with the number of tracks you're running with a slower drive .. it's just a question of how many. jeff
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missword
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 02:07:36
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S_barber, I use a similar laptop to yours (pentium M 1.8 gHz, 5400 rpm drive, 1.5 gigs of RAM) and I regularily run 15-20 audio tracks on it with no problems, plus effects and some softsynths. If I run projects larger than that, then I start having dropouts. I'm sure I'll eventually upgrade to a 7200rpm drive, but if your projects are not larger than mine, you should be okay.
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s_barber
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 08:44:55
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Thanks for the info. Sensibly, the best advice comes from those with similar experience of course. In hindsight it might have been better to get the 7200 HD but opted not to spend the extra cash. It looks like a 7200 external HD is in order but in the meanwhile it sounds like I'll be fine initially. Most my tracks will be MIDI and audio will be less than 10 tracks. By the time I add on the external drive the technology will be even better and less expensive anyways. I have one firewire port on my laptop. I'm assuming there is a way to hook up multilple firewire devices. Is there?
This is a good forum. I'm impressed. As an old Cakewalk DOS user I'm looking forward to coming back into the fold again.
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motux
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 08:47:17
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I have a 2.0Ghz Centrino laptop with 2Gb RAM and have no troubles running Sonar 5 PE with my MOTU Traveler. It runs 24 audio tracks without a hitch, just as long as you're careful in planning your FX routing. I noticed that the Alien Connections Revalver SE is very CPU hungry so try to use it sparingly 
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Abelardo
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 10:09:19
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ORIGINAL: jmarkham
i beg to differ Abelardo ..
i use Sonar, Vegas, SoundForge, Acid, Project5, and Protools on my laptop. Without
exception, they have problems with my 5400 RPM drive for large projects. Moving the same
projects off to either a Firewire or USB2 drive cures the problem for two reasons:
1. The laptop internal drive is used for application, operating system, SWAP and audio streaming
2. 5400 RPM combined with the slow access times for many laptop drives exacerbates the problem.
theoretically, a 5400 RPM could keep up with audio stream *alone* .. but this is hardly a
typical scenario for DAW or multimedia applications.
given my experience doing live tracking in the bay area, i'm not alone .. without exception,
everyone who i've seen doing live tracking has a dedicated 7500 or above firewire drives.
my attempts to use the internal drive for multitrack projects have all been failures .. even
with magic and smelling salts applied.
jeff
ps: be wary of hdtune.com .. my spyware and pop-up blocker went off on this site.
About the pop-up blocker you're right but hey it's a harmless blocked pop-up and this little program is very useful and freeware. I agree on what you're saying that if you run out of steam it's a good thing to balance the load on two disks. Still usb drives take a bit more load on the cpu than the internal drive. Firewire is better, depending on your firewire chipset: this may still be a bit of a cpu hog.
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Guest
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 12:35:27
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hey abelardo .. usb is a higher maintenance protocol (as compared to firewire) .. so
i use firewire when i can .. particularly when chaining devices.
jeff
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s_barber
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/04 14:13:04
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Thanks for the reply.....That's interesting that you can run 24 tracks of audio without a problem on your Pentium M. Is that with a 5400 RPM drive also?
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motux
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/05 00:18:19
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Yes, 24 tracks of audio and it's on an internal 2.5" 100Gb 5400RPM drive which performs very close to 60Gb 7200RPM 2.5" HD. Contrary to many techie's belief, it's been proven that 2.5" 7200RPM drives (as of this time) actually gives you a very very slight performance advantage over the newer & higher density 2.5" 5400RPM drives, unlike desktop 3.5" 7200RPM drives.
post edited by motux - 2006/02/05 03:13:52
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sammyp
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/05 03:02:23
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5400 rpm is going to be a problem .. unless you're running very small projects
(1 to 4 tracks). Sorry but you're completely wrong. I have a 2 ghz Pent, 512 ram, 5400 rpm HP laptop that runs a 20 + track count with redrum and lot's of effects at about 55 - 65% cpu usage @ 21 msec. To the orginal post - you'll get some work done with the system you decribed - i wouldn't get high expectations about using performance oriented soft synths though.
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mlockett
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/06 14:57:58
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I was using a notebook with a 5400rpm drive, and 2GIG of RAM; I did find the harddrive was the bottleneck on larger projects, and found that an external drive alleviated the problem. With smaller projects the drive was not an issue. Plug-ins are usually not overly affected by hard drive speed; soft samplers tend to be highly affected by drive speed unless you have enough RAM to put it all in memory.
So the definitive answer to the original question...
It depends. :-)
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jack.bauer
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/06 16:12:43
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intel pentiumM is fine. 5400 rpm is fine. the PentiumM has a shorter cpu instruction pipeline than intel P4 (the PentiumM core is based on pentium 3) and it SCREAMS for most audio encoding apps. single threaded of course... in most benchmarks it beats a64.
drive speed is but one bottleneck. the least which is rpm of drive platters. most laptop drives have 8mb cache. only one or two models now are even 7200 rpm but i/o is STILL ata 100 pata... last i checked.
Cakewalk HomeStudio v2; M-audio 2496; x2 3800; msi rs480; 1gb dually xms mem; c drive: 120gb pata, d drive: 320gb sata raid; xp pro
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tunekicker
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/06 21:31:35
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Firewire devices are made with daisy chaining in mind. It's best to hookup your external Hard Disk directly to your computer, then add the recording interface or other device on from the HD. This way a power failure/accidental power button push won't cause you to lose data from the HD.
Peace,
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motux
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/07 22:36:02
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My point is that 2.5" 5400RPM HDs are capable of simple recording projects not exceeding 24 tracks. If you're able to stretch your budget to incorporate external Firewire HDs for bigger projects then by all means do so
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jb
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RE: Pentium M w/ 5400 RPM HD Enough?
2006/02/07 23:17:32
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ORIGINAL: motux
My point is that 2.5" 5400RPM HDs are capable of simple recording projects not exceeding 24 tracks. If you're able to stretch your budget to incorporate external Firewire HDs for bigger projects then by all means do so
- -I routinely record 30 tracks @ 3 ms. latency on a V2000z with a 5400 drive. 6 ms. will buy me a few more. I can live with that. jb
Celeron 300A o/c 450, SBLive, Win98SE
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