Hi, folks.
 
Just updated from Producer 6 to 8.3.1. I also moved from my old Pentium 4, where I kept Sonar on the main hard disk and all audio and MIDI date on a separate slave disk, to my new HP Pavillion Pentium Dual Core with 6gig RAM.
 
Since the new hard disk has 640gig, I really didn't want to have to install the old slave drive. I figured that the speed, processor upgrade, and extra RAM of the new PC would eliminate the latency/drop issues I'd get on the old machine, which had only 1gig RAM. I also hate the extra motor noise that having two separate drives going at the same time generates.
 
So I've moved all the files from the slave drive to the HP's main drive. I haven't done much work with it (spent all night installing the software), but wondered whether it should be okay, given that I don't use many softsynths or effects in my work.
 
Would it also be more efficient if I partitioned the hard drive to create a separate partition just for the audio files?
 
Jeff in Boston

I have always kept my audio drive separate from my program drive as a practice.
 
Need? It depends on what you are doing with your computer and how fast it is.

The disk I/O performance is dominated by the sustained  read/write rate and the sizes of
cache/buffers.

The sustained read/write rates are largely determined by the rotation speed of the platter (7200 RPMs 
being the minimum I would run). The number of read/write heads and actuators play into this
as well.

As such, the conventional wisdom is to have a completely separate drive .. not partitioned, but
separate ... for audio / video streaming.

The reason is that the OS, programs, and VM page file may be in contention with the continuous
streaming that the DAW is either fetching or writing to disk (oft times both are happening).

If you're running a few tracks at a lower sample rate (48kHz), it's entirely possible that you'll
be able to run on a single disk just fine.

But, if you ever wish to do many tracks and higher sample rates, a dedicated audio drive is a
must.

Please note that a partition of a single physical drive does very little to improve disk performance.
The most it does is to make it a little easier to find free blocks (since it not in contention with the
general OS and other programs).

For my own usage (since I'm constantly taking projects from studio to home studio), I use Glyph
drives (FW800).

Hope that helps,
jeff

Would it also be more efficient if I partitioned the hard drive to create a separate partition just for the audio files?

Nope. Here's the deal: the slowest activity that a disk drive performs is called a seek, meaning the action of physically positioning the head over the desired track in preparation for reading and writing data.

Compared to reading and writing data, seeking happens on a glacial timeframe. Minimizing seek times is therefore the single most important technique for speeding up disk drives. That's why you defrag a disk, so that pieces of large files are physically near one another, thereby reducing seek times.

Once the head makes it to the track, data can be sucked off the disk quite rapidly. But once the track's been read (or written), then the head needs to seek again to the next file fragment and everything slows to a crawl again.

Because drives have multiple heads, it can read more than one track before it has to move the heads again. So when data is written, all the heads are used sequentially. A group of tracks that can be read or written from the same head position is called a cylinder (from back when you had one head per platter surface, so that a vertical set of tracks formed a cylinder). The larger the cylinder, the more data that can be moved between seeks.

When you partition a drive, you're making smaller cylinders. Partitioning makes sense only for higher-level data organization and not for efficiency, which actually suffers. For maximum speed, you should always make the entire drive one partition.

Whenever a program must access multiple files concurrently, it has to do a lot of seeking as it furiously bounces from one file's physical location to another's. But if those files are separated onto different drives, each having its own set of read-write heads, one drive can be seeking while another is reading or writing data. Fewer seeks, faster performance.

Bottom line: use multiple physical drives, each formatted into a single partition.

you nailed it bit! one hard drive won't get it done.  so bit, I assume its also better to have separate drives for your audio and samples.  i'm thinking about getting one external drive for my laptop for recording my audio and also for my samples - would this be like the same thing as using just one hard drive for everything?

Thanks Bitflipper!  That was interesting...and thanks for the detail.  You explained some stuff I had wondered about before.

Are there any suggested Internal / USB External harddrives that would help? I only have one harddrive as well and would like to get better performance (although I do have a quad core). 

they say internal SATA is the way to go, so that's the way i went, and it is all good.

raisindot
 
Would it also be more efficient if I partitioned the hard drive to create a separate partition just for the audio files?
 
Jeff in Boston

You shouldn't need separate drives for program and data unless you have a slow drive (5400 RPM). Its recommended, but not required.

I would not put multiple partitions on the drive. It doesn't improve the performance one bit.

Bitflipper,
 
I've been trying to learn more about your statement in a post on separate audio drives from 2009.
You said: "When you partition a drive, you're making smaller cylinders. Partitioning makes sense only for higher-level data organization and not for efficiency, which actually suffers. For maximum speed, you should always make the entire drive one partition."
 
I've been trying to research this, but I can't find anywhere that "partitioning a drive makes smaller cylinders".
 
If I understand correctly, a cylinder is made up of  tracks that are lined up vertically underneath each other on the platters. Partitions are created in horizontal concentric circles on all platters, moving from the outside to the inside of the platters. So how would making a partition reduce the size of the cylinders? As far as I can see, it would only reduce the number of cylinders, not the size.
 
I understand that it's not good to have frequently accessed data on two separate partitions, because this would cause the seek heads to shuttle back and forth between the partitions, thereby slowing performance. But what about if you had frequently addressed data on the outside partition, like audio data, but the other, inside partition you used only for storage and backups? You would never be using both partitions at the same time, so I can't see how this would degrade performance . . . unless you are right about cylinder size being reduced.
 
Can you please clarify?
 
Thanks