suggested Hard Drive arrangement for Sonar's bits

chuckebaby


having your os, sonar, vst plugins, project files all on the same partition is a chore.
but heres the thing, ive never run sonar on a 1tb drive.
ive never run it on anything larger than a 500gb HD.
ive got 3 drives in my main daw.

everything is kept on the 500.: my os , sonar ,project files, plug ins, sample librarys.
only storage for the other drives.
if I need a large library, ill remove another one first.

hard drives these days are becoming better but it all depends on where this computer came from and are they stock drives or added in after.
I think we take for granted the meaning of recall to often. and to ask your drive to recall your os, plug ins, sonar, picture cache, samples, bla ,bla,bla. is a lot of work for your ram and drive both.
larger drives have  more platters. your HD working overtime to recall data from different points of your drive is madness.

I know I will here those who don't see it that way, but im going by research, research ive learned and experienced.
ive done a lot of drive testing in my time.
there are just so many elements that come in to play, platers, newer drive, older driver ? ..speed..cache..
I keep it small if possible.

chuckebaby

WallyG

chuckebaby


having your os, sonar, vst plugins, project files all on the same partition is a chore.
but heres the thing, ive never run sonar on a 1tb drive.
ive never run it on anything larger than a 500gb HD.
ive got 3 drives in my main daw.

everything is kept on the 500.: my os , sonar ,project files, plug ins, sample librarys.
only storage for the other drives.
if I need a large library, ill remove another one first.

hard drives these days are becoming better but it all depends on where this computer came from and are they stock drives or added in after.
I think we take for granted the meaning of recall to often. and to ask your drive to recall your os, plug ins, sonar, picture cache, samples, bla ,bla,bla. is a lot of work for your ram and drive both.
larger drives have  more platters. your HD working overtime to recall data from different points of your drive is madness.

I know I will here those who don't see it that way, but im going by research, research ive learned and experienced.
ive done a lot of drive testing in my time.
there are just so many elements that come in to play, platers, newer drive, older driver ? ..speed..cache..
I keep it small if possible.

FWIW: Having designed power electronics for disk drives for 18 yrs (Spindle Motor Drivers and Voice Coil Actuators Power I.C.s) for Seagate, Maxtor, Digital, Quantum, and WD, with all things being equal, i.e. Spindle Speed, Seek times, etc. a larger capacity drive (or higher data density) will be faster since (assuming sequential data), there will be less switching to different platters when reading/writing. The latency introduced by the moving voice coil read/write head is perhaps the most significant source of delays in the read/write process. This becomes even more of an issue with the smaller drives since it will fill up faster and require the drive to look for empty spots to "park" the data.
 
Walt

didn't they just come out with the first 1TB / 1 platter HD a year or so ago ?
then tell me how a 1 tb with 2 platters in it id faster than a 1 500 / 1 platter HD ?
like I said the newer, older, that all comes in to play.
I understand what your saying but not everyone is using an hd made within the last 2 years, 3 years even.
 
data transfer from 2 platters simultaneously on 1 HD through 1 data cable (usb) isn't rocket science :)
 
In my statement, I said "with all things being equal" so that would imply the same amount of platters and all other parameters the same. But in the case you mentioned, "1 TB/two platter vs. 500GB/1platter I agree that it sounds like the 1TB drive is like 2 500GB drives so why should the 1TB drive have higher speed. I believe that initaily it will be a tie, once again everything else being equal. But as the drive stores more data, the 1 TB drive should then be faster. (A lot more open space for sequencial R/W).
 
Additional thought is that even though there might be two platters instead of one, the biggest delay in the read/write process is moving that Voice Coil motor and the motor doesn't know or care what platter it's working on. All the heads are in parallel. The time to switch between platters is relatively small (electronic signal vs. mechanical motion.) 
 
BTW: I worked in your state (Shrewsbury,MA) for many years where one of the drive manufactures I worked with was Digital Equipment which was bought out by Quantum, then Maxtor and finally Seagate. The engineers referred to the company as DigiQuackstorGate.
 
Walt