I just built a new rig(my first!) and have a fresh clean slate so I want to set everything up as optimized as possible. I’m running Cubase 6.5 and a bunch of EWQL stuff(Platinum plus and soon Hollywood Strings). What is the best set up as far as where to record to? I have a 2TB 7200 as my main drive and 2 SSD drives that I’m planning on putting Hollywood Strings on. I also have an external 750 GB 7200 G-Drive Mini. On my old setup I was using the external. Any ideas?
My set up is i7 3820,Asrock X79 Mobo, 32G RAM, 2TB 7200 HDD,120 GB SSD,240 GB SSD,Nvidea Geforce GTX 460 GPU,
Cubase 6.5
Obviously, the thing to avoid is piling too much activity on the same (physical) drive - so don’t, for instance, record audio on a drive that’s already being kept busy fetching samples; and if EWQL Plat Plus is all on the same physical hard drive, there might be times when you try to stream more samples than the drive can handle: some users used to have separate HDDs for strings, brass, woodwind and percussion (and some even used to have separate slave PCs for each of those four orchestral sections).
There was a lot of discussion of this kind of thing on EW’s forum a few years ago - you could learn a lot from searching for relevant threads there.
Other things that I learnt from those discussions … With HDD interfaces prior to (e)SATA, an internal HDD’s throughput is significantly faster than an external one’s, and, for an external drive, firewire’s faster than USB (even when the specs might suggest otherwise). And, if you partition a HDD to deal with samples in one partition and other data elsewhere, the sample drive ought ideally to come “first” because the speed of access on the outer parts of a HDD is higher.
Generally, people advise not putting samples on the same physical drive as the OS, though I’ve been able to run smaller sample libs with not-too-intense usage without trouble from a partition positioned after the (logical) drive containing the OS. But it could be asking for trouble if you tried that with EWQL’s orchestral sample libs.
just remembered I have a hot swap bay on the top of my case (Thermaltake Overseer RX). Stupid question but is a hot swapped 7200 drive the same as having an internal 7200 drive? If so then I’ll do that,I used a Corsair TX750 PSU and the cables are so stiff it will be a real pain in the ass the add another internal right now.
“just remembered I have a hot swap bay on the top of my case (Thermaltake Overseer RX). Stupid question but is a hot swapped 7200 drive the same as having an internal 7200 drive?”
Pretty much so. Even better with e-sata. If it’s usb and you find a problem that you suspect is related then try another usb port although IRQ type conflicts are fairly rare lately.
yes i have all projects (audio)on a 2nd drive just incase the o.s. in my pc goes down, apparantley this makes life easier for your programs to run anyway .i`d use the external for backing up your stuff.
In this particular context, hot swap / internal / external are totally irrelevant. They’re just what kind of box the drive is sitting in.
But one thing to keep in mind is that a removable drive in the computer’s case is not necessarily hot-swappable. Since a hot-swappable drive is of little use unless you have a RAID configuration, I would suspect what you have is simply a removable drive. So I would verify that it is in fact hot-swappable before you start yanking drives out while the computer is running.
What’s really important is how the drive interfaces with your computer. Some removable drive bays interface via SATA, while the one in my computer uses USB. I haven’t heard of (and I haven’t really looked for one), but there might be a removable bay that uses Firewire. So here’s how the interfaces rank up:
hi,
the case has a
“TOP-MOUNTED HDD DOCKING STATION
The top-mounted 2.5’’/3.5’’ HDD hot swap docking station allows for disk exchange on-the-fly, so users are ready to easily and swiftly access data storage drives right from the top of the case without the need to open the side panel”
I connected the cases sata data cable to the mobo (Asrock x79 extreme6) when i put in together. I just don;t have a drive to test it with right now, I’ll find one and test it this weekend.