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#1
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Audio session hard drive size?
When people talk about having a dedicated drive to run the audio on besides the system drive..
Is this drive purely for the audio session in use? and what size should this drive be? Cheers -Ben |
#2
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
the idea is to spread the I/O's out on 2 or more drives (which lessens the load on each). A hard disk is only capable of so many I/O's per second (IOPs) or so much throughput. SCSI drives can handle random streams of data better than ATA (IDE) or (most) SATA drives due to a feature called "command queuing".
That said, the operating system usually contains a pagefile, which it uses to swap RAM to disk (as virtual RAM) so to have more physical RAM available for running apps (like Pro Tools). To avoid starving either the swap functions, or Pro Tools audio streams, it can help to put them on separate drives. At some point you still reach the limit of a single drive, so the bigger systems have more than 1 drive for teh audio files also. As for size, it does matter, although most operating systems can exist nicely in 10GB or less (including swap files, etc). Personally, I use a pair of 250GB SATA drives. One for OS and session backups, the other for current audio projects. so far so good.
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Pro Tools 2022.9 UAD Apollo 16 (v10.1) Dell XPS 8940 (i5-11400) Win10 www.studiodrumtracks.com www.doubledogrecording.com |
#3
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
First, if you're working in LE then there's a limit to how many tracks you can record at one time. Certainly any single drive should be able to handle that load. In our digital audio truck we routinely record up to 48 tracks 24/48 on one drive for cumulative hours of time on a 125 gig drive. The fiber drives we have appear to handle the thru-put a little more effortlessly than a Firewire but I've used both. The down side of the fiber drives, for us, is that ninety percent of what we record leaves the truck for mixing and they usually want it on Firewire. That means a transfer. Any track count above 48 and I'll split the tracks across two drives. I have very little experience on small sessions. That's just not the nature of our business.
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mfrepp |
#4
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
I have 2 250G sata drives which I wish to break into partitions and dual boot.
So far I have this: Drive 1 Partition 1 WIN XP OS drive for protools - 15G Partition 2 Win XP OS drive for Games - 15G Partition 3 Protools and plug ins - 20G Partition 4 Games - 100G Partition 5 Storage - 100G Disk 2 Partition 1 Protools Audio Session Drive - 30G Partition 2 System ghost image and backups - 10G Partition 3 Storage - 210G What do you think? Is 30G enough for the active session drive? Cheers -Ben |
#5
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
As per Drive 1, keep in mind that you can only have four primary partitions on any single hard drive. If you need more partitions, then you have to take one of those four primary partitions and create an extended partition. Within this extended partition you can have as many logical partitions as you need.
Personally, I like to keep all of my partitions as primary partitons. I'm not sure how Protools handles extended and logical partitions. My suggestion would be to keep the Protools audio drive as a primary partition. The only other thing you might run into problems with, it the size of your XP-Games partition. If you have a lot of game, and they are newer ones, then you may run out of space. Also, you don't need a seperate partition for Protools and plug-ins. You will install the Protools software and all plug-ins on your main XP-Protools partition. Certianly 15 gig should be enough for that. Also keep in mind when you format a hard drive, the amount of usuable space on the physical drive goes down considerably because of the overhead involved in the operating system addressing the physical storage. The easy formula is to take the hard drive size that the manufacturer states, and multiply it by .931 (this will get you pretty close). So, for a 250GB hard drive, 250 * .931 = ~ 232.75GB of usable space. Here's the way I would partition it (assuming 250Gb drives): Disk 0 1--Windows XP w/Protools (C:) = 80GB 2--Windows XP w/games (D:) = 152.75GB Disk 1 1--Protools Audio (E:) = 32GB 2--Data Storage and Backup (F:) -- 200.75GB 32 GB for Protools should be plenty, especially if you practice good back up etiquite and burn your sessions to CD or DVD once you get to a good point.
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Justice C. Bigler www.justicebigler.com Lenovo P50: quad-core i7-6820hq, 64GB, 2TB SSD, Win 10 Pro / Protools Ultimate 2023.6 / HD|Native-TB 2018 MacBook Pro: six-core i9, 32GB, 1TB, Monterey / Protools Studio 2023.6, / DVS / DAR, L-ISA Studio Home/mobile: Focusrite Red 8Pre+HD32R / Clarett 4Pre Road/hotel: Roland OctaCaputre / Apogee One |
#6
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
Thanks for all that great advice! I appreciate the effort.
I have a couple of questions: Why does the protools drive need to be 80G? I thought that drive was for protools and plugins only, 80G seems like a hell of a lot or is this normal? (i've never installed and run protools on a PC before) Is the Audio drive generally used as a blank drive for use by the audio session that is currently active? Or are projects generally stored there as well? Would a big prottols session require 32G of space? Appologies for the nieve questions! Gotta learn some how hey. Cheers -Ben |
#7
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
What about sample libraries?
Should they be on the audio drive with the PT sessions or can they co-exist on a partitioned OS drive? Would you put them in the same place as your plug ins? |
#8
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
Sample linbraries, I belive do best on a THIRD seperate hard drive.
Yeah, 80 GB is probably rather large for Protools. I just used it as a default size. You could probably make do with even 30 or 40GB. But, keep in mind, that Windows will start puking all over itself even you hard drive usage goes above 50 percent to the usable size.a default Windows XP instal is about 4GB. Protools will be abot 100MB, and plug-ins will depend on how many you have. 40GB should be a good size. The audio drive is a drive that everything is recorded to. It can also store your older sessions. But please back up often. It will save you a lot of heartache and probably money. The main thing about data storage, is that you want to keep it on a seperate hard drive, incase you main system drive fails. For whatever reason, I've not had any drive failure problems on a non-Operating System hard drive.
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Justice C. Bigler www.justicebigler.com Lenovo P50: quad-core i7-6820hq, 64GB, 2TB SSD, Win 10 Pro / Protools Ultimate 2023.6 / HD|Native-TB 2018 MacBook Pro: six-core i9, 32GB, 1TB, Monterey / Protools Studio 2023.6, / DVS / DAR, L-ISA Studio Home/mobile: Focusrite Red 8Pre+HD32R / Clarett 4Pre Road/hotel: Roland OctaCaputre / Apogee One |
#9
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
Your protools sessions go on the audio drive. Every session will include all the audio for that session. A few dozen songs will chew up an 80 gig drive plenty quick so plan on archiving sessions to DVD or external drives(and "clean out" un-used audio files to keep the archive files from getting huge). Some commented on partitioning to spread a session over 2 drives-THIS IS NOT CORRECT. You do not want to spread your audio over 2 drives as protools works hard enough without searching multiple drives. Spreading data over 2 drives is what RAID is all about and protools does not support RAID(yet).
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HP Z4 workstation, Mbox Studio https://www.facebook.com/search/top/...0sound%20works The better I drink, the more I mix BTW, my name is Dave, but most people call me.........................Dave |
#10
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Re: Audio session hard drive size?
My comment about two drives did not necessarily apply to pro Tools LE. That reference was to HD3 sessions we record in the MTV Digital Audio truck. These sessions are regularly 64+ audio tracks at 24/48 and we've found one just drive cannot handle recording that much data by itself. I was just pointing out how much hard drive space a Pro Tools session could use. A four hour session at those track counts and sample rates is in the hundreds of gigs. I never even get close to those numbers on my LE system, but I'm used to thinking in the 125/250 GB range. Anything smaller seems odd to me. I'm sorry if someone misunderstood my response. On my personal LE system I put the session folder and wave files on the 125Gb firewire drive. Plugins and Pro Tools Operational files are on the system drive, but that's just me. I'll go away now and keep quiet.
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mfrepp |
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