gswitz
When you have a bunch of hard drives, sometimes you have a little latency while it wakes up the sleeping drive. This is less with solid state drives.

Basically because you have more drives it is more likely that the one with the stuff you need is sleeping. Spin up time is usually a second our two.

I was under the impression that setting advanced power options so that the drive never sleeps will keep them spinning at all times, thus avoiding spin up delay. If that is the case, then the only delay should be a seek, and that is not likely to be significantly different from a parked state vs moving from its last/current position. Am I missing something?
 
I assume everyone has their DAW power settings that way, and no one is using a "green drive" that does power/speed down throttling automatically.

slartabartfast
...I assume everyone has their DAW power settings that way, and no one is using a "green drive" that does power/speed down throttling automatically.

 
I have 7 drives in total and 2 of them are "green". The green drives are only used for storing things that don't affect the audio engine, i.e. archives, backups, manuals and other reference materials.

Starise
Just curious if this will cause any issues I am not aware of concerning retrieval and overall performance. I seem to be running three ok so far. The 4th drive would only be for samples.
 
 

 Yes. The biggest issue is you will want to add more stuff. That's about it.

slartabartfast
I assume everyone has their DAW power settings that way, and no one is using a "green drive" that does power/speed down throttling automatically.

Not me. I really never have a problem with my drives. I do let them turn off to save power. I suppose this could be a mistake.

When I'm recording a band and get bored i might wake up a sleeping drive to do some house keeping. I suppose there could be a buffer risk there. I record with digicheck. When there is a problem, I usually lose one even buffer across all tracks. I keep the buffer maxed to reduce risk when no one is listening to the recording. This loss of a buffer has usually happened when i mess with cakewalk while recording with digicheck. Cakewalk will pop that buffer. Hitting record enable on tracks pops the buffer for example. This happened once while showing-off cakewalk to a pretty person concurrent to recording a band.

I only know of one time when I lost a buffer due to hd activity. Here's what happened. During a long 16 track recording, at intervals, I save the current recording and start a new one. When the intervals are fairly short the files aren't too big.

When done correctly, it is as fast as renaming the file I'm saving. Fast in other words.

But if I've already renamed it and save it again, it makes a copy. I did this once, afraid i had forgotten to save it and terrified to lose it. So, at @1 gig per hour of music at 88.2 the file I saved was probably close to 30 gigs. Took a minute on an old laptop 7200 drive. I made the band wait for it. I got a few rolled-eyes but they like me and waited. Once done, I immediately started recording and the band kicked right in. They were tired and finishing up to go home. In a repetitive section at the front of the song, I lost a buffer. Idk why but something to do with that large copy I'm sure. I was able to copy one of the repeated beats over the lost buffer and the band never knew (unless they read this).

Can you tell which beat?
http://gswitz.blob.core.w...R_20_TakingOnWater.mp3

The nice thing about losing exactly a buffer is you can know precisely how much time too slip back in. Copy paste, cross-fade, who says I lost a buffer?

...

When using cakewalk and tracking or performing on the recording, the drive being recorded to is obviously not asleep. No one will wake a sleeping drive. No risk.

FWIW, On a modern build, the power-savings by letting drives sleep is pretty minimal.
 
Let's say you have a HD in a USB docking station.
Most of those have firmware that automatically puts a drive to sleep after several minutes of inactivity.
Unfortunately, you don't have access to change this sleep function/behavior.
When going to save a project, the machine will spin-up that HD (waiting for it before completing the action).
I'm impatient... and that drives me crazy.  
 
Another example, let's say you allow your "Samples" drive to go to sleep.
On one particular project, you're not using any disk-streaming samples until the bridge of the song.
When the bridge hits, you're playing a really busy part with lots of sustain pedal (lots of disk-streaming polyphony).
By the time the Samples drive spins back up, it's missed the beginning of the bridge.
 
This is also an example of why any type of performance throttling (for DAW purposes) is not a good idea.
Machines are great, but they can't reason. 
During the bridge, the song breaks down to kick and lead vocal... so the OS/motherboard decide to significantly reduce clock-speed and park CPU cores.
Right after the bridge, the song has a massive chorus-out... with 24 tracks of backing vocals, stacked synth tracks, full string section, everything but the kitchen-sink. 
That's going to result in a transport drop-out.
With performance-throttling fully disabled, this is never a concern.
 

Jim Roseberry
I've got 10 internal drives in my main studio DAW.
You'll be just fine...  

 
Yup - I have 2 M.2 NVME 2TB drives (boot and most used sample libs), and 2 TB SSD's and a couple of 4 TB SSD's cranking away - no issues, as long as you have decent cooling and a healthy enough power supply.
 
Bob Bone

@Jim, Good points. I never buy anything but "black" drives. The whole idea of drives going to sleep is probably less relevant using SSD with no internal moving parts.