On 12/23/2010 03:59 AM, Ivan K wrote:
>
> I was surprised to hear that so many people write their audio
> files to a second drive. I always thought that most audio
> people preferred as few drives as possible in a system to keep
> noise down.
that's an issue, sure. but i write my audio data to *two* other drives
in RAID1. it's louder in day-to-day operations, but not in the long
term, when you factor in the noise a dying hard drive makes, together
with the noise the sound engineer makes when that happens in the middle
of an important session.
> On a somewhat related topic, is there a brand of SATA drive
> that people recommend as far as reliability, speed, and low noise?
just an inverse recommendation: do not, under any circumstances
whatsoever, buy western digital "green edition" drives - they think it's
a brilliant idea to park their heads 8 times a minute (as a power saving
measure!), which means they effectively self-destruct within a few months.
my approach for 24/7 drives is: as large as possible, since it's the
motors that consume power, not the gigabytes.
to shelf old projects, i have bought a little gadget that's effectively
an external sata backplane that you can stick raw drives into (with usb2
and e-sata connectors to the computer). i buy whatever is cheapest per
terabyte for those (last time i looked, it was 1.5).
> Also, even though Terabyte drives are inexpensive these days,
> would a 500 GB drive be better as far as speed (reading/writing)
> than a 1 TB drive? (I really would not need a full TB anyways).
no. if you don't need a full TB (from which i deduce you are not into
really huge sessions and projects), the performance of any current sata
drive should be more than adequate.
us audio guys really don't have to care anymore for throughput...
even seek speed won't be that important, because we usually read large
chunks of data, where the initial delay is insignificant - as opposed
to, say, a mail server, where hundreds of users read thousands of very
small files every second.
> P.S.
> My current Seagate 76GB SCSI drive just died and rather
> continue to buy SCSI and buy high priced drives that
> are smaller compared to the recent SATA drives available, I
> thought I would buy a SATA for my current system as well
> as an new system this time.
scsi is dead. sata beats the crap out of it in terms of
performance/price. and for those extremely fast but small 15k platter
arrays which used to be a scsi mainstay, time is running out fast with
the advent of SSDs.
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Received on Fri Dec 24 16:15:03 2010
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