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Hard Drive Set-up (IDE and SATA?)

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Confusitron, 13 Jun 2005.

  1. Confusitron

    Confusitron What's a Dremel?

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    I am going about building a recording machine for "my" band to record with. I think I have gone in the right direction with every piece of the machine, aside from storage (although, if you have any suggestions or experience with some great socket 939 boards or PCI-E X16 video cards, feel free to mention them, since I am having trouble deciding on a board and video card). Now, would a good idea be to run the operating system off an IDE hard drive and have all other storage for recording on and SATA? Should the drive containing the operating system be an SATA drive? Does an SATA set-up have to operate with RAID or can it just be arranged in a similar fashion to IDE hard drives? I'm not too familiar with SATA.

    Thanks for any assistance in advance.
     
  2. lord nicon21

    lord nicon21 sexy *******

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    sata can be just like a IDE drive. so its up to you for what you are using it for you could use ether and you would see much difference.

    and its called "Just A Bunch Of Disks" (JBOD) a non raid array. :thumb:

    with which drive to put the os on its up to you it does't matter if you have the cash i would use SATA :thumb:
     
  3. Confusitron

    Confusitron What's a Dremel?

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    Would hard drives in a RAID set-up work more efficiently than if they were not? I know that at different RAID settings, speed differs. If I had the money I'd probably by SATA hard drive duplicates and put them in RAID 1 (if that is the one where both hard drive store the same data), but I don't think that is possible as of right now.
     
  4. DreamTheEndless

    DreamTheEndless Gravity hates Bacon

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    sata or ide wont make much difference.

    You will get the highest performance with one dedicated drive for the OS, one dedicated drive for the page file, and an array for recording the music to. I am guessing that you want to be able to record multiple tracks at once? That's pretty io intensive. All three of the volumes I suggest could have other files on them with no problem.
     
  5. lord nicon21

    lord nicon21 sexy *******

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    yes RAID 1 is Mirroring and Duplexing i.e the 2 drives are the same.

    it cost a lot but if you have stuff you don't want to loss. but if your doing music i think a good DVD burner would be better.
     
  6. DreamTheEndless

    DreamTheEndless Gravity hates Bacon

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    Raid types:

    I was going to type in the definitions, but here is a pretty good website defining them.
    http://www.bytepile.com/raid_class.php#07

    I would suggest raid 0+1 or raid 5 for what you want to do.
    Raid 5 requires a minimum of 3 discs, raid 0+1 requires minimum or 4. The discs used in an array should match each other as closely as possible.
     
  7. lord nicon21

    lord nicon21 sexy *******

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    RAID 5 rips your RAM so stock up if your going to use that i would say 1GB++
     
  8. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    Get SATA. IDE will die out (well, like PCI graphics) within a couple of years, no sense buying something that will have no resale value when an upgrade comes along.

    I've got five (!) SATA hard drives on my computer. No RAID at all, all independent of each other, just plug them in and have fun. If you're getting a PCIE mobo, you won't need to worry about "F6 drivers" unless you have the OS on a RAID array.

    What I'd say is get a smallish drive for the OS and app install, then get a trio of something fairly large and go for RAID5. Take lord nicon's advice and get a lot of ram for it (it's like $80 for a pair of 512mb sticks, you have no excuse), unless you wanna get a sepearte card with hardware-level raid5.

    RAID5 would be good for that (and really most things for that matter) because you have a level of safety (if one drive fails, you don't lose all your data) without direct mirroring and loss of space. The basic concept is take a RAID0 array. For each bit, add all the 1s and 0s together. If it's odd, write a 0 to the parity drive, if it's even write a 1 to it. If the parity drive fails, replace it and it can be rebuilt. If a "RAID 0" drive fails, it will read off the working "RAID 0" drive(s), add them up, and compare that to the parity drive to see whether it needs a 1 or 0 in that space.

    Of course, it can get fairly taxing on the system, both CPU and RAM. A lot of RAID5 controllers actually have a SDRAM slot in them for that reason, but you'll be fien.

    Probably info overload there lol. Basically what you need to know is raid5 is somewhere between raid1 and raid0 for speed, but with the added benefits of parity (redundancy to a degree) and not having as much storage eaten for safety. You only lose one disk's worth of space, even if it's an 8-drive raid5 array.



    What you should get out of this: don't bother with RAID for the operating system drive. If you want to mess with RAID for storage, only choose RAID1 or RAID5 (if the controller supports it, of course, not all do raid5). RAID1 is safer, but RAID5 lets you keep more of the space.
     
  9. Confusitron

    Confusitron What's a Dremel?

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    Well, that all sounds good, but I've got some financial limitations. I'm selling an Apple G4 iBook (what was originally going to be used for recording, but it choked on playback) to pay for this machine, which will cost around $900-$1000. I'll probably get a 120 GB and a 250 GB drive. I'll partition the 120 GB into two, one for the OS, and the other for whatever. I think I'll get Hitachi drives.

    I'm not sure what I should be doing about a video card. No gaming is intended to be done on this machine, but it may be used for video editing, but that is less graphics intensive than a game, at least that's what I think. Maybe this graphics stuff should be another thread.
     
  10. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    Well RAID5 certainly wouldn't be cheap.

    Like someone said, you're realistically better off getting a big hard drive and a DVD burner. 470GB worth of media is only like $25 at newegg now, whereas a 400GB hard drive goes for about a buck a gig.

    Video editing mostly needs a strong processor. AFAIK it doesn't have much to do with the GPU, but I think that also depends on the application.
     
  11. DreamTheEndless

    DreamTheEndless Gravity hates Bacon

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    Do you have any existing drives that you can canabalize for this box? If you put your OS on some old 20gb (or whatever) drive (Not just another partition on the same drive as the music) and your page file on another drive it could make a big difference.

    A seperate partition would actually be worse than one big drive in this case because if the system has to swap to the pagefile while you are trying to write your music stream the heads would have to move further to do it.

    Newegg has SATA 40gb western digital drives for $56
     
  12. Confusitron

    Confusitron What's a Dremel?

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    I'll probably end up buying a new drive for the operating system. I do have some old 20 GB drives and larger ones too, but some are 5400 RPM, have crashed, are three or four years old, etc.

    How about if one drive was for the operating system and partitioned for the programs?
     
  13. DreamTheEndless

    DreamTheEndless Gravity hates Bacon

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    That would be fine. I was just talking about the best performance for capturing your audio. The most important part is that the drive that do the recording are not doing anything else at the time.

    What software are you going to be using for recording?
     
  14. Confusitron

    Confusitron What's a Dremel?

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    I'll be using some form of Cubase. I have Cubase LE, as it came with my PreSonus Firepod, although I might get SX.
     
  15. DreamTheEndless

    DreamTheEndless Gravity hates Bacon

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    Yeah - go for whatever drives and/or partitions you want for os, pagefile, applications, data etc... and a seperate high performance drive or raid 0 array for recording to. You could even burn all your tracks to dvd or cd once they were recorded and not have to worry about losing data if the raid 0 failed.

    You could go all out and set up 2 WD Raptors in raid 0 -
     
  16. riluve

    riluve What's a Dremel?

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    OK - sorry, this is just where I poke my head in and say SATA is an IDE device. It makes no sense what so ever to say SATA vs IDE.

    Serial ATA and Parallel ATA are different implementations which both use IDE. So if not to sound silly, the least you should consider saying is PATA vs SATA.
     
  17. Hamish

    Hamish What's a Dremel?

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    :eyebrow:
    maybe if you're using software raid 5, which would not be a good idea, it'd be horribly slow
    hardware raid 5 is awesome tho
    <3 my raid 5 array
     
  18. lord nicon21

    lord nicon21 sexy *******

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    yeah if you get a nice RAID card then yes :thumb: but if you use onboard RAID then it uses the cpu a bit more.

    but try look foe a card that has a 64+mb of cach with some good speed drives <thats what i'm going to do on my files server :clap: when i get the cash :rolleyes:
     
  19. Hamish

    Hamish What's a Dremel?

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    if you're going to do RAID 5 you have to do it properly with a hardware raid 5 controller really, otherwise its just not worth it

    my card has an SDRAM slot, takes upto 256mb :D
    was about £120 iirc :)
     
  20. Tolsk

    Tolsk What's a Dremel?

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