I’m upgrading my DAW’s storage and am debating between SSDs and plain ol’ HDDs.
My primary partition is comprised of two 1TB SSDs in a RAID 1 configuration. It’s ideal having the OS and applications on a fast, fault-tolerant RAID array, but not so ideal for storing Cubase projects - especially at 24 bits / 96 kHz. My 1 TB is disappearing fast.
For medium-term storage of audio data, a pair of 10TB HDDs in a RAID 1 configuration would be far more economical (while remaining fault-tolerant), but will I see a significant performance hit? I suspect initial project load times might be affected, but what about routine editing performance?
Just work on a project from a single smallisch ssd. Then transfer it to your 10TB raid. If you want to work on another project just copy it to the SSD. If you go for a single 1tb ssd (not so smallish) you can have quit a few projects on it before you have to move.
A 10TB raid is a dangerous idea though. If one disk fails, you need to add a new disk and then rebuild the raid which has to copy 10TB of data without failing. Or do you also have off site backups?
I understand what you’re recommending, but are you also saying Cubase performance will indeed suffer significantly if the project is loaded directly from the 10 TB drive?
I guess what I’d really like to know is this: How does Cubase manage project data for the purposes of performance? Does it cache audio data in available RAM? Does it cache it on the fastest available hard disk? Or, does it merely stream from the project storage location? Some data-intensive programs, like Adobe Premiere, allow users to specify “media cache” folders where data is stored while editing. That would be ideal, but I see no such thing in Cubase.
Good point! Clearly, if money were no object, RAID 5 would be the better (and more economical) option. [In fact, why didn’t I think of that before?! I do have four available drive bays and, yes, my mobo supports RAID 5. Hmmmm…] But, yes, I also employ a dedicated backup drive (non-RAID). For archiving, I do DL Bluray. Off-site would be better, for sure, but I’m afraid of the cloud storage fees. 24/96 eats up at least 25 GB per project. But, yeah, I probably should look into it.