Optimal hardware for professional audio recording

CarlosMMartins:

When you refer to "Mutiple sata Hard disk, so you can stream multiple audio to/from several different Hard disks for better performance.", are you talking about RAID 0 or 5?  Please elaborate.

Thx,

Bill

Hi Bill,

When streaming audio - either paying or recording (or both) - the hard disk is usually under a lot of "stress", trying to keep up with all the data reads and write requests; though of course, RAM plays a major role in caching as much as possible.

Anyway - and this will also depend on the software you use, though most audio apps allow you to setup multiple hard disks as temporary "scratch" space - the idea is:
For instance, you want to mix some tracks into a final "mix". Using a single disk, the disk heads will have to do a lot of "back and fort" movement - also known as disc trashing -  which severely reduces disk performance.
By using multiple disks, you could use it as to read the data from one disk and write it to the other disc, having a much smoother workflow.
(It's the same effect as copying a large data file from/to the same disk, which will take at least twice as long as copying from a disc to a different physical disc)

Of course, this is only valid for large data/audio files requiring disc cache. If all the audio tracks fit in RAM, it won't be using the hard drives as much.

In any case, having at least 2 HDs is beneficial, as you can set the windows paging file (and any other temporary locations) to the secondary Hard disc.

CarlosMMartins:

Thanks - so the key here is that the audio software is capable of recognizing and using the additional discs - correct?

Bill

they know all disks - it is a bios feature

Hard disks are always recognized by the system - no problem there.
And you can set them up so the Operating System also makes the best use of them (placing the page file, etc).

But yes, those disks will be better used if the "software" intelligently uses the multiple disk.
Usually, memory intensive programs, like photo/video editing applications (Photoshop, Premiere), etc, allow you to set up additional swap files in different disk - effectively bypassing WinXP memory management (hopefully with a smarter one that takes advantages of the different discs! :)

I don't know if this still holds true in Vista.

If not, you can still make use of the discs, by setting up your "workflow" using the different discs in the most efficient manner - though it can be tricky to manage it "manually", depending on what you need to do.

Anyway, it was just a "pointer" for you to consider - getting at least 2 HDs will allow you to set the temporary paging file to 1 disc, while working mostly with the other. That alone will benefit all memory intensive programs.

Thanks for the explanations

Bill