Which HD setup, for Music Making?

[nicmcv]

Hi Everyone.

I'm not sure what setup is best for me.

I use my PC for making music mostly, so I guess a separate drive for the OS/Apps and a separate one for my music data would be in order?

Back when I built my last pc (5 years ago) it was really common for hardcore users to have this setup. However, with the onset of massive fast cheap storage is this as much of an issue?

I've been using SATA in diffrent arrays for the last few years and didn't really notice a big diffrence when varying the array (0 and 1).

There's a huge choice of Hard drives and ways to set them up, I very tempted just to buy a 500gb HD and say boo to the array.

In a perfect world I would have a separate box for an array and a modest HD on the actual PC itself. Given my budget it'll have to be 1 or 2 drives in my box.

Hit me with some OC wisdom

 

[stopstartstall]

Well in my computer I've got a 160GB HD with the OS and music programs on (for me this is just XP, Sonar, Reason and a load of plugins), and I have a 500GB second drive for storage/backup.

I keep a copy of important stuff I'm working on (ie stuff for my band cuz they'd kill me if I lost anything!) on both drives but less important stuff is usually just on the 500GB one.

I don't have them RAIDed. I find it easier to keep them seperate tbh. If I ever need to reinstall I know I can without losing any of my music and without having to mess around with arrays.

At the end of the day it's entirely up to you though. Just go with whatever is easiest!

 

[nicmcv]

Well in my computer I've got a 160GB HD with the OS and music programs on (for me this is just XP, Sonar, Reason and a load of plugins), and I have a 500GB second drive for storage/backup.

I keep a copy of important stuff I'm working on (ie stuff for my band cuz they'd kill me if I lost anything!) on both drives but less important stuff is usually just on the 500GB one.

I don't have them RAIDed. I find it easier to keep them seperate tbh. If I ever need to reinstall I know I can without losing any of my music and without having to mess around with arrays.

At the end of the day it's entirely up to you though. Just go with whatever is easiest!

Thanks for the reply.

That does sound like a very straight forward solution. I am more prone to the simple solution, as I'm sure RAID may give me headaches. RAID is still kinda tempting though, but a bit more pricey.

 

[stopstartstall]

RAID is still kinda tempting though, but a bit more pricey.

Yeah, that was my feeling too but at the end of the day I wanted to the easiest set up and to me that was two seperate drives. Even though hard drives are the usual bottle necks in music systems, I very rarely get to the point of maxing mine out even with some of the bigger tracks I've done.

If RAID offered me a lot more than two drives I probably would have gone for it, but for me it didn't so I stuck with what I knew.

 

[rpstewart]

The data rate required for audio production is nowhere near that required for video so there isn't the same need to avoid I/O contention. Therefore I'd think that a single internal HDD (partitioned if you like it that way) would suffice and some kind of separate backup whether that be another internal HDD or an external one.

 

[melbourne720]

I'm building a PC for a musician, and we agreed on two 500GB Samsung spinpoint drives, non raided, with boot/apps on one and data/pagefile on the other. Quite, and it boots fast enough, and seperate data/apps area seem most important (an external drive will be used for backup of data).