I have listed a few reasons why two hard drives are better than one as many people continually ask me why I dont recommend partitioning a single hard drive, and instead recommend two separate hard disk drives. If RAID is used then you need 3 hard drives for the same reasons that are outlined below, I strongly recommend against raid unless its really needed in your situation which is very rare. With raid one drive is used for the OS, and another which could be an Array of two or more disks for recording on to. Raid can actually be worse then two disks and this page explains why raid can cause problems when recording.
Click on Advantages, or scroll below to learn more
* Less chance of data corruption of system files
* Faster performance
* Prevents both drives from becoming fragmented as fast
* Decreases head movement and will lengthen the life of both drives
* Allows for Lower latency
* Note on Partitioning drives
* How to setup your drives for the best performance *Recommended reading*
* Which drive do I install programs to ?
* Downfalls / limitations of IDE
* What HD specs mean. TRANSFER RATES and SEEK TIMES and DRIVE LATENCY
DATA Corruption
Computers do make mistakes now and then. Have a look at the specs below and you'll see the ERROR RATE of a standard 7200 rpm drive. It has been found that recording audio or streaming large files on to the same hard drive that contains your swap file can cause corruption in your swap file and other important system files...For this reason NEVER record to the same partition as your swap file and windows files. If you only want a few audio tracks (less than 8) then 1 hard drive is all you need... If you want low latency or higher track counts then this is another issue and two disks is probably required.
Faster performance
By having one physical hard drive for your operating system and another hard drive for your Audio files, you achieve many things. The first is faster performance. In the case your only using the one drive for both purposes it takes time for the read/write heads to move from the system area of the drive to where your audio files are kept. Refer to the example specs below to see a real SEEK time.... If the heads have to move from one side of the disk to the other, you have to wait 28 ms depending on the exact hard drive model. You may go "so what ? its only 28ms", well your audio card is probably set for 23ms latency by default unless you have changed the buffer even lower.
Decreases head movement, will lengthen the life of both drives
If you only have one hard drive and this includes a single drive in two partitions, the read/write heads have to move from the system partition all the way to the audio partition. Not only does this take time for the heads to move back wards and forwards all the time, it also really wears out the hard drive due to the excessive movements of the heads. Not to mention the risk of the hard drive not being able to deliver the data in time. If you have two drives then the heads hardly move at all. A reduction in noise will also be noticed. If you partition a single disk in to two partitions then your actually making the drive work harder and perform a lot more unnecessary head movements. The drive is then slower and gives worse performance when compared to leaving the disk as one large partition. Of course leaving the disk as one partition means the drive becomes fragmented much faster...
Prevents both drives from becoming fragmented as fast
The more free space you have, the less the drive becomes fragmented. When a drive becomes fragmented the SPECs of the drive begin to get worse. Use a de-fragmenting utility to defrag your hard drives regularly regardless of how many drives and the size of them. Also if you don't install and uninstall any software, the system disk takes forever to become fragmented and you only need to defrag the audio drive which can be done when your checking emails and the like. You will have a much more responsive system.
Allows for Lower latency
See all the above topics on how it helps give lower latencies. The main one is the SEEK time of the drive. If you have a separate drive for audio and the files are not fragmented then your drive has a seek time of 2ms. With one drive you may still get 2ms most of the time until Windows needs a file to keep running. When this occurs that seek time can jump up to figures over 10ms....Dont forget the drive latency is on top of this seek time as well !
Note on Partitioning drives
Because a hard drive is made up of disks that spin, different areas of the disk can be much slower than others. When data is written to a HDD the drive starts at the outer edge, then as the drive fills up makes its way to the inner tracks... Ever seen the wheels on a car turning ? If you put wheels with a smaller diameter on your call the wheel has the spin much faster to travel the same distance. This is common sense and the same applies to a hard drive. If you partition a drive in half you have just given the fastest part of the drive to your system and the significantly slower part of the drive to your audio files. There are advantages to partitioning, such as the drive does not become fragmented as fast. However the increased head-movement which translates into a larger SEEK means its not as optimal as having a dual hard drive setup.
