The best harddisk setup

[Peterjk]

My two 640 GB WDC drives have been a bit flacky lately, so I decided to let them "retire".

My new setup (to arrive any day now) are two 1TB Samsung SATA's and one 480 OWC Extreme SSD disk.

I've tried to research a lot, but would you agree that I would get the most responsive system, by installing the OS X and samplers and VI's on the SSD and then format to the two 1TB with two partitions on each. The first (ones) to function as work drive and the second (ones) to function as a placeholder for older finished projects. This way I used the SSD for the system, the fastest part of the SATAs for current projects and the slowest part of the disk for long term storage.

Agree? Or did I misunderstood something?

BTW I am running fairly large mixing sessions 120 tracks of sometimes 4 hours audio. Also running songwriting sessions with fewer tracks (in the 80s) but with loads of VI's.

Mac Pro 2 x 2.26 Ghz (early 2009) 12 GB ram.

Any comments or suggestions are extremely welcome....

[Emcha_audio]

Usually you'd want the vi's (samples not the program) to be installed on a separate disk. But with a SSD.. not sure how that will pan out.

[Peterjk]

Hi, Emcha,

Why do we wanna have the VI programs separate from the samples. I could partition the SSD as well, but from what I've learned there is nothing gained by that?

[KMcK]

You want to avoid streaming samples off the same drive as your OS lives on, since the OS is constantly paging it's HD in the background you get better performance by having the samples on a dedicated disk. Same goes for your PT sessions.

I personally wouldn't partition something as small as a 1TB drive, plus partitioning can backfire on you in a lot of bad ways so I would avoid it overall unless you've got a disk that's too big for the OS to read as one chunk.. Disks are fast enough these days that you don't have to worry about using the "fastest" part of the drive anymore.

Why did you get Samsumg's out of curiosity? The WD Caviar Black is pretty much the de-facto drive for Audio/Video these days.

I'd do the SSD for your OS, one 1TB for your sessions and the other for your Samples. You could use additional leftover space on the sample drive for backups if you wanted to, but external firewire drives will serve you better for backup purposes, they're easier to unplug, box up and store someplace safe when not needed.

[Peterjk]

I did not choose the WD Caviar Black because my Mac Pro (early 2009) and if I'm not mistaken ALL Mac Pro's only support 3G SATA. The Samsung drives are recommended by OWC.

If I only place the OS on the SSD I wont get any (or only very little) advantage once ProTools is running. That's why I thought putting the Sample Library (for streaming) on the 480GB SSD as well. Or am I mistaken?

I will reconsider partitioning. Any other thoughts?