seriously basic question about running sessions off another internal drive.

[nwright]

So, I've read on here how many run their recording sessions of an external drive and then use the computer HDD to do everything else.

Has anyone used 2 seperate internal HDD to do this? I'm assuming it'd the same as running a session off externals, but just wanted clarification.

I have used an ext. HDD before, but in mobile aspects (laptop as my DAW), I'd be more comfortable just using an extra internal drive if it helps with latency and/or processing speed/power (less gear to carry and potentially drop).

 

[shinakumah]

WooooooHoooo I finally get to contribute something to this community... lol

Its recommended for any processor-exhausting multimedia applications to run the program application from the primary hdd, and read/write data from/onto a secondary hdd.

If the secondary hdd is housed internally as in most desktops, chances are they are connected via SATA and are much faster then USB or Firewire. Most laptops do not house a seconday hdd internally and are generally interfaced via USB, Firewire, and most recently, the eSATA.
Speeds of both the interfaces (measured in bps) and the hard drive (measured in rpm) are key factors. Typical desktop hard drives usually spin at 7200 or 10,000 rpm and laptops at 5400 - 7200 rpm.

Here's the speeds of the interface connections:
USB 1.1 – 15 Mbps (obsolete)
FireWire (1394a) – 400 Mbps (recommended for read/write data transmission)
USB 2.0 – 480 Mbps (recommended for data backup storage. Not recommended for above actions)
FireWire 800 (1394b) – 800 Mpbs (becoming much more popular now)
SATA 1.5 – 1.5 Gbps
SATA 3.0 – 3.0 Gbps - newest of them all. And the fastest. Soon, all new computers, both desktops and laptops should come equipped with at least 1 external interface for eSATA 3.0.

For now, Firewire interfaces are the way to go to connect a secondary hdd because of their difference in architecture from USB 2.0's allow for intelligent data transfer controls. I don't want to get too geeky with the details, but... yeah.


hope this was ok... its my very first post. : )

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Good question, good response.

 

[nwright]

Thanks for the reply, shinakumah.

My laptop does have a 2nd bay for another HDD, so I may check it out. I have used an external Firewire drive in the past, but I had to daisy chain it to my recording interfaces, and my latency went a bit higher than I'd like (only one FW port on my laptop). Using a 2nd internal HDD seems like a better option for me.

I also have another USB ext. HDD that I've experimented with in recording, and I didn't really notice much difference between USB or FW. But, at the time I wasn't recording multiple tracks or working in a big session.

I never even knew I had a 2nd bay until I examined my laptop closely today. I dropped it coming in to work this morning...8 foot drop from the stairs to my office to concrete. It was in a canvas Targus case with a bit of padding...I freaked, and thought for sure it was toast...Been running fine all day. The molded screw holder is broke at one corner by the cover hinge, but it doesn't affect anything. LCD still works great, no dead pixels or anything...So, I'm happy and now I have a reason to get an int. HDD!

 

[shinakumah]

wow... I broke my first DAW laptop (sony vaio) when it fell off my desk onto an "oriental" rug that I bought from IKEA... so I sold the rug on ebay to offset the cost of my new laptop... and as a matter of fact, I too have a 15.4" targus laptop bag with lots o' padding!

 

[Wolfeman]

Yeah a lot of laptops these days are rigged for a second drive, usually for RAID purposes, but you can use it as a regular second drive.

 

[Mulder]

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_core_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd

With this SSD as an audiodisk (in your laptop) you won't run out of tracks.

It smokes every HD for audiopurposes, including 15k SCSI RAIDthingies.

 

[nwright]

Holy cow, I didn't realize that these kinds of hard disks were out yet. I guess it's no surprise to see a HD with no moving parts (a la flash drive), but I hadn't seen them like this yet. Thanks for the post!

EDIT

wow 480 bucks...

What do you think of this newegg review though?

Cons: This drive has no sram cache. it will NOT perform as advertised except for small transfers. Copy anything over 1 or 2GB and transfer speed drops to less than 5mb/sec. Once it's controller cache is full, it starts eating system resources like you can't believe, spikes to 100% on the CPU and two-three second system freezes. It took me two weeks of wondering what we were doing wrong and denials from OCZ that anything could be wrong before they fessed up to the fact that there's no sram cache like on a regular HDD or SSD and thus will never perform sustained writes well.

Other Thoughts: if all you're doing is using it to watch movies, great, as long as you're not in a hurry to copy your files to the drive. Don't buy this thinking you're going to get SLC SSD performance...not even close. If you want decent read speeds, ok, if you want to write big files frequently, forget it. Needs a redesign. A little cache wouldn't have cost them much.

 

[colonel kurtz]

another question related to this topic...it's already been established that you should run your host program on the system file and keep the audio on a 2nd drive, but which one do you keep the actual sessions files on, and is there a reason why one works better than the other?

 

[JBroll]

Ideally I wouldn't keep anything but the operating system(s, for the bi-curious) on the OS drive. I'd keep all of the audio stuff together, no doubt, but if you can manage to have a smaller drive for system software and other programs and another drive for audio, plugins, and personal stuff that would be a good start.

Jeff

 

[vespiz]

I use 1 system drive, 1 back-up drive and 1 "work" drive, where I save all Pro Tools sessions. Occasionally, I use the system drive for some back-ups but mostly it's for programs and OS. Plus 2 external FW/USB drives for back-up.

 

[Mulder]

Holy cow, I didn't realize that these kinds of hard disks were out yet. I guess it's no surprise to see a HD with no moving parts (a la flash drive), but I hadn't seen them like this yet. Thanks for the post!

EDIT

wow 480 bucks...

What do you think of this newegg review though?

Damn, hadn't seen that yet.. Have to dive into it... The fact that SDD's have a very low seektime is the best for audio, since your HD reads all over the place, there's no sustained reading since all the audiofiles are stored in different parts on your HD...

Mmmm.. If this turns out to be true I get me an iRam for inbetween, I'm doing a project now with a crazy amount of tracks, need a very fast drive..

Strange, cos quite a few servers are switching to SSD, to overcome the seektime-latency of 15k drives..

I'll get back on this. Anyway, an internal drive is always better than external, both USB and FW eat up systemresources and add quite some latency..

 

[nwright]

Damn, hadn't seen that yet.. Have to dive into it... The fact that SDD's have a very low seektime is the best for audio, since your HD reads all over the place, there's no sustained reading since all the audiofiles are stored in different parts on your HD...

Mmmm.. If this turns out to be true I get me an iRam for inbetween, I'm doing a project now with a crazy amount of tracks, need a very fast drive..

Strange, cos quite a few servers are switching to SSD, to overcome the seektime-latency of 15k drives..

I'll get back on this. Anyway, an internal drive is always better than external, both USB and FW eat up systemresources and add quite some latency..

Seems to me in reading that review, it would only come to be a bigger issue when archiving off the drive, which is OK I guess. I wouldn't think you'd hit 1GB at any point during a session. Also, that review would lead me to believe that there are some SSD's that do have an sram cache, which may be a better alternative. In looking through Newegg at prices, I'd assume that sram cache SSD's are the ones that were quite a bitmore expensive?

 

[egan.]

Aren't there still serious lifespan issues w/ SSD's?

...flash-memory cells will often wear out after 10,000-100,000 write cycles, while high endurance cells may have an endurance of 1–5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer.

If true that would be a reason to never use this for audio. I have 2 copies of everything but I'd hate to intentionally handicap one of them.

 

[nwright]

hmm, never heard that, either.

With these issues and the high price of the drives themselves, I may opt for a regular laptop HDD.