Hard Drive Question

[k8stribe]

I have a new ASUS w/ a 750G HD, I cant find info on the hard drive and was having a few storage and disk speed issues. I purchased a 1T WD Caviar Black addition and was wondering if I should run all of my music software and plugs off this new hard drive or if I should just save all of my files and projects on it as a storage disk?

[Paul_Bryce]

I would put all software on the 750gb HD, and all recording projects on the other ( assuming it’s an internal drive )

What kind of issues are you having with the 750GB HD ?

[k8stribe]

@Paul Bryce

What kind of issues are you having with the 750GB HD ?

Just seems a bit slow opening song files and I do get drive spikes occasionally in larger projects. Didn’t have this issue on my old system. The price was right and I need the performance and the storage space. The Caviar black runs at 7200 rpm in its standard 32mb mode but I read that it will run at 10000 rpm in 16mb. Should I leave it at 7200?

[Karl]

@k8stribe

@Paul Bryce

What kind of issues are you having with the 750GB HD ?

Just seems a bit slow opening song files and I do get drive spikes occasionally in larger projects. Didn’t have this issue on my old system. The price was right and I need the performance and the storage space. The Caviar black runs at 7200 rpm in its standard 32mb mode but I read that it will run at 10000 rpm in 16mb. Should I leave it at 7200?

I dont think it changes rotational speed…

There’s another thread on this forum that talks extensively to your question…

Hard drives and partiioning

Also, FWIW, There are 3 flavors of Western Digital drives. Black, Blue and Green. Black is considered the “industrial strength” version. Intended for things like servers etc… It’s a solid drive but uses a constant speed seek method (the read write heads always move at max speed) that can make it rather noisy…lot’s of clicking, and tends to run a little warmer.

The blue drives are what I use. Lower cost and they use a read/write head seek algorythim that calculates how long it’s going to take for a particular sector of the disk to come around to the heads and moves the heads just quick enough to get there in time. Reduces noise, lower power req’s and lower heat. Possible longer life span due to less wear/tear on the heads.

Green are the eco- version drives. Good for large capacity back ups but not ideal for DAW use. Slow data xfer rates.

There’s a free bit of software you can download from the web called HDTune. Nice package that will run diag’s to your hard drive system and show you dtat xfer rates etc… Handy for checking your hard disk performance.

All the best,

Karl