Best possible hard drive configuration
 

Hi All,

I've been skimming the forum, but didn't really find what I am looking for :

I want to know which would be the best possible hard drive setup for use with PT9 (and Digi003) (regardless of 'cost' for an extra drive). Let's forget RAID drives for now, don't like 'm, too many issues, and not sure if it even works with PT.

At this moment, I have a Mac Pro with 4-core Xeon, 1 terra system drive (OS X 10.6.4, and installed yesterday a second 1 Terra-byte to use as an audio drive (I did find this recommendation on the forum and manual)

I asume it's best to use internal SATA drives over external Firewire 800 drives, it's obvious that SATA drives are much faster than the 800Mbit firewire. I keep my Firewire 800 drive for backups.

I also understood that I need to put PT9 on my system drive, and record audio to my 2nd drive, which I did.

but now the following questions :

* where do I put my sample library?

* where do I put my Kontakt library?

* would it be a better idea to split the audio drive in 2 partitions, one for audio tracks, and one for the samples?

* would it be even better to buy a 3rd drive to put my Kontakt libs, sample libs and loops on? Just bought a new 1 terra drive for 120 euro's, so that's not the cost (official MAC dealer, guess you can find cheaper ones)

* to defragment the audio drive, I read that the only way is to 'clean' (is this 'formatting') the audio drive from time to time (once a year for example) (on windows there is a defrag util included)? In this case, I would prefer to keep my sample libs on a 2nd partition on my audio drive, or even a 3rd drive (there are 4 bays for something in the Mac Pro :-)

thanks for any advice!

R.:confused:

Re: Best possible hard drive configuration
 

Use a third drive for samples. You are correct on reformatting.

Re: Best possible hard drive configuration
 

I have the Burly hotswap bay from MacGurus. It's been rock-solid for years. MacGurus recommends the following drive prep:

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages...ZeroDrives.php

Using about 18 Seagate drives over the last few years, I've had no total crashes, and only one occurrence of corrupt data. Use Diskwarrior occasionally, and run regular backups.

Three drives looks good to me. I haven't noticed any performance difference between SATA and eSATA. Buy a Burly! You'll like it.

Re: Best possible hard drive configuration
 

My FW800 drives are about 75 MB/sec. Using the same Hitachi drive inside my MacPro, I get about 125 MB/sec.

eSATA and SATA are the same. One is external.

Buy a drive for samples.

Re: Best possible hard drive configuration
 

I had been wondering something similar myself a few days ago. Currently, I have PT9 on the system drive along with all of my sample libraries. (Also have a 1tb drive dedicated to recording audio) I don't have tons of plugins, but enough that I'm now down to 70gb left of free space on the 320gb system drive. So my question is this: If I get another drive specifically for sample libraries and move the libraries currently on the system drive, does PT have problems finding those libraries since the path to them has been changed? If so, what is the proper way to move sample libraries? Thanks. And sorry for the hijack,Whasssaaahhh.

Re: Best possible hard drive configuration
 

yes, 3rd drive for samples
if your feeling saucy you could try an SSD for the fast read times

Do they actually work? I thought they weren't approved for audio yet?

Re: Best possible hard drive configuration
 

Leave at least 10% of free space on your system drive.

Re: Best possible hard drive configuration
 

Actually... for a samples drive an SSD wouldn't be bad.

The problem with most SSD (except for really really expensive ones) is that they have a fairly limited number of writes available. If you were to use one as your audio drive, it would die quickly. As a samples drive, the only reason you should be writing to it, is if you are installing a new library. Otherwise, it should be mostly reads, and super fast at that.

Might be a worth while investment... but I'm still holding off on SSDs for a while. Perhaps another year or so.

Ah yes! Read only - mostly for a sample drive. Makes total sense. I hear they're wicked fast but won't be ready for Audio read write any time soon. You'd also need to me careful to know if any temp files were needing to be written every time you load a library from Kontakt, let's say. Thanks, Dism!