How to manage hard drives for samples and audio with protools ?

[Loudyman]

Dear Protools users and friends,

I have already made a thread, where many of you have answered and gave me very good advices on hard drives performances.
I decided to create this one because the topic is, somewhat related, but different.

Now, to definitely take a decision and have done with this trouble, I ask you this simple question :

Can I "record to / playback from" my FW800 external hard drives some audio tracks while I'm using a plugin** (in ProTools) that streams from disk or loads into RAM its samples stored on an internal SATA hard drive at the same time, in the same session ?

I mean by this: is this possible, allowed, supported, common ?

**Plugins like Superior drummer 2, Kontakt 4, Eastwest Play , etc....

I just need an answer to this question, since advices on hard drives performances have been already covered in this thread :http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=262437

Thanks in advance,
Loudy :)>

[25ghosts]

I get superior results with a 4 drive (500GB Each) raid zero system.
They have been soft raided thus I aint using hardware controller.
I use SoftRAID (The software) to do it. It's awesome.

That will allow you to play some serious kontakt and oterh VI sessions. Plus it's smoking fast in regards to copying etc. 4x as fast.

While PT 8.0.3 under Snow Cat will allow you to set a soft raid as a Record volume digidesign does NOT recommend recording onto such a constellation. Therefor I am recording to an internal SATAII.

Any Mac Pro harpertown has 6 NOT 4 internal sata connectors. And any Nehalem has 5. The extra connectors are located on the main board and can be addressed with a cable. Very nice and great.

You could also remove the optical drive and replace that with a hard disk. My harpetown currently has 8 internal drives. Wonderful


I hope this helps

A few Links

RAID General

SoftRAID

[Loudyman]

Dear Avid/Digidesign,
Do you have any official position on this question ?
There is no information on the website related to this and the guy from Avid tech support wasn't really talkative on this topic.....

[crizdee]

Originally Posted by Loudyman

Can I "record to / playback from" my FW800 external hard drives some audio tracks while I'm using a plugin** (in ProTools) that streams from disk or loads into RAM its samples stored on an internal SATA hard drive at the same time, in the same session ?

I mean by this: is this possible, allowed, supported, common ?

Yes! 1000's of us are doing this.

1 drive for system
1 drive for audio
1 drive for samples

Internal SATA drives will perform better, but firewire 800 and 400 drives will suffice in most cases.

Chris

[john1192]

drive 1 (4 partitions) 1.5TB - PT7 leopard / PT8 leopard / PT8 & Logic 9.1
snow leopard / itunes music

drive 2 500GB - audio

drive 3 500GB - samples

drive 4 1.5TB - Video

once 2TB 7200rpm drives get cheaper (right now 109.00 for 1.5TB seems to be the cheapest GB per dollar)

backup is to external bare drives ...

i did not know about the additional 2 SATA II slots inside .. i did know about the DVD drive by swap for harddrive ...

was thinking of putting a swappable drive slot in the DVD slot ... backup by just sliding a drive in / backup and then shelve it ...

cheers

[The Missile Silo]

I have a PPC G5 and am running two internal Velociraptors:

1. System
2. Production (Recording/Mixing Sessions), Sample Libraries & Video on occasion

So far in all of the years I have been running it this way I have had no detectable problems.

If I had more available drive bays I would certainly put my Sample libraries on a dedicated drive but, right now, what I have works and I'm happy.

Ron

[Loudyman]

Thanks guys,

Following the advices I've had and the setup that would best suit my needs, I want to do this:

-1x internal sata boot drive for protools , system and plugins.

-3x other internal sata drives of the mac to store the samples libraries of my sampler and plugins (and spread equitably different libraries over them)

-4x external FW800 drives "daisy-chained" for my audio recording

-1x external FW800 for backup

Is there anything wrong or theoretically unworkable in this configuration ?

[Loudyman]

Mmmm well....
In other words, the question is:
Excluding Audio hard drives which must be of the same type, can we mix the type of hard drives in a session for everything else ? (and use every type of hard drives at the same time , of course!)

DigiTechSupt are you there ?

[uno1234]

I bought 4 internal velociraptor drives. 1 for the system, 1 for samples, 2 for audio projects.

It is blazing fast. All my drive errors are gone. I can run a 96 voice 96k session all off of 1 velociraptor w/o a single hiccup. Granted not all tracks are playing at once, but it is a seriously big session. I will never go back to firewire and 7200 rpm for pro audio use.

[Howardk]

Originally Posted by Loudyman

Thanks guys,

Following the advices I've had and the setup that would best suit my needs, I want to do this:

-1x internal sata boot drive for protools , system and plugins.

-3x other internal sata drives of the mac to store the samples libraries of my sampler and plugins (and spread equitably different libraries over them)

-4x external FW800 drives "daisy-chained" for my audio recording

-1x external FW800 for backup

Is there anything wrong or theoretically unworkable in this configuration ?

Many people have provided comments in your previous thread on this topic. There are a lot of other challenges in ProTools that are much more significant than this so I suggest you just start using your system so you can start to discover. . .