Best hard drive for recording to?

[Eric Lambert]

Will this thread ever introduce the word "need?"

"Dear OP, what do you 'need?'"

"I never record more than 10 tracks at once, and maybe two VIs."

"OK, well you don't need a Cheetah."

I do a fair bit of recording which would be considered strenuous for the computer, in ADDITION to an immense amount of VI playback, and I've never had my 10K rpm drives bark at me. The key is not fast drives, it's separation of media types. Keep VI samples separate from audio, and keep video on yet another drive. Do that and there will rarely be an occasion where you'd "need" your platter spinning faster. The added money, heat, noise is just wasteful in most cases.

[spenner]

+1 for WD.

A lot of my work goes from MIDI to mixdown (no time for bouncing to audio). I'm talking a lot of multi-timbral MIDI and Instrument tracks setup for mixing with plugins. For several years now it's been four 32 (now 64) MB cache WD Black 7200 rpm SATA drives with 2 dedicated to sample libraries. Loading is fast enough not to make me feel a need to upgrade and performance is solid.

[Raoul23]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I don't know what metrics you are judging "performance" by but 5400 rpm is 5400 rpm and nothing will reduce the write latency time to approach that of a 7200 rpm drive.

You do not want a WD green drive for reasons others have mentioned. If you have friends/"experts" telling you otherwise you need to ignore that advice. You can search here for past explanations. But it's not interesting to drag this up again--from the point the green drive is just not recommended and for good reason. If you want to get stuff done reliably go buy a black.

Darryl

Hi Darryl are you saying that a lower RPM causes latency?

Thanks for your help

[Emcha_audio]

Slower rpm usually means slower seek time, access time, write and read speed. Which will cause latency, reduce your ability to have a high count of audio tracks and vi's, as more of these will bottle neck the writing/reading speed of your HDDs. Of course you should always have an independent System drive, Vi drive and audio data drive. Making this 3 physical HD drive, not partitions.

[Raoul23]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

Slower rpm usually means slower seek time, access time, write and read speed. Which will cause latency, reduce your ability to have a high count of audio tracks and vi's, as more of these will bottle neck the writing/reading speed of your HDDs. Of course you should always have an independent System drive, Vi drive and audio data drive. Making this 3 physical HD drive, not partitions.

Thanks dude

i only have 2 drives at the mo and i dont use many if any virtual instruments just superior drummer thats all so will running 2 drives be fine

Cheers

[CME]

And I'll also recommend avoiding the green drives. I've never used them but several people have tried them and they cause problems when used for audio. You could probably do a search and find several threads on it. Including that, there's been lots of good advice in this thread.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by The Weed

NOT GREEN. They have a power saving feature, which you don't want to have happen when recording.

Cheers,

You can usually disable the power saving settings, but still not a drive recommended.

here's a good article about it.

http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/04/27/...e-design-flaw/

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Raoul23

i only have 2 drives at the mo and i dont use many if any virtual instruments just superior drummer thats all so will running 2 drives be fine

Most likely.

How many tracks will you playback and record?

In most situations, especially if you're spreading the load across two drives, even 7,200rpm HDDs will be completely fine. If your track count reaches >50 then maybe you'll want to reconsider. Ultra fast seek times are BS, as is the recommendation for 15,000 rpms. Don't get caught up in the hype, unless money is no object to you. Either way, it's unlikely that you'll notice the performance potentials.

[Emcha_audio]

Saying it's BS doesn't mean you are right. I've had raptors before, and I had to upgrade to higher speed drive due to the sheer number of Audio track I was doing. There comes a point, if you reach it, that even 10000 rpm just don't cut it, and no amount of cache will save you when you reach the HDD limit.

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

Saying it's BS doesn't mean you are right. I've had raptors before, and I had to upgrade to higher speed drive due to the sheer number of Audio track I was doing. There comes a point, if you reach it, that even 10000 rpm just don't cut it, and no amount of cache will save you when you reach the HDD limit.

You're obviously at that point, and so are a couple of my studios' machines, and no doubt there are other studios which require such throughput, but is the OP at that point? That seems to be the issue and it doesn't sound like he's even close. Two 15,000 rpm drives for Superior Drummer and basic record/playback? That's just ridiculous, and you're suggesting that he overspend without once having asked about his typical workflow. You're merely relaying your own needs, which I'm not attempting to disqualify as unnecessary for your studio - you would know best - but it's not your workflow that's being configured in this thread.

I've had sessions with 30 audio tracks and around 100 channels of streaming VIs working from two 7,200 rpm drives. No system sweating whatsoever. I'm relatively certain that the OP isn't taxing his system to this extent. Superior Drummer is brilliant at balancing caching vs. streaming and doesn't ask much of its hard drive. 24 bit audio at 44K or 48K is a drop in the well for modern machines.

To the OP: if you buy 10,000 rpm drives and they're too slow, send me the bill -- I'll take them from you and send 15,000 rpm drives in return, my treat.