Splitting audio tracks between two drives?

[Gene100]

Hi folks, I have been enquiring about an issue regarding recording audio to hard drives and I am hearing all sorts of things back.

Put simply, it is supposed to be best in a session to record your audio tracks between two dedicated audio drives as opposed to just one. For example instead of recording 24 audio tracks to a particular hard drive it is best to record 12 to one drive and the additional 12 to the other.

It is not recommended to partition a drive say in two and record to two partitions on the same drive as it kinda defeats the purpose.

I have always recorded all the audio in a session to the same partition on a hard drive. I keep all fade files, audio, session data in the one place so that I can back up the entire session audio and all easily to DVD etc.

I have been told that splitting the audio between two drives gives better performance. But I reckon this could make backup a pain as the audio is in two different places!

I have read that round robin is a NO NO too!

I have now have a Mac Pro with three drives.

1TB
250 gig
500 gig

Some say it is a bad idea to partition drives, others say you must do so and it is all very confusing.

I also have two external 250 gig firewire drives.

Could some of you shine some light on this for me please. I would appreciate it as I am about to initialize the drives etc.

I have 76 sessions to finish off (have been busy doing other things) and want to get this new system off on the right footing you see!! Gonna get PT 9.

Thanks,
Eugene in Ireland.

[John_Toolbox]

With the speed of today's drives, you are probably fine with just one unless your session has a lot of tracks with heavy edit density. If you are able to playback and record your sessions right now without error messages, 1 drive is probably fine.

I personally partition 1TB drives into 4 smaller partitions. This helps keep everything organized better, but it also reduces the amount of space that the hard drive would need to seek in to find files. Obviously recording to 2 partitions on the same drive simultaneously would be a waste, but it's not a bad idea to record to a smaller partition of a single drive if you know you'll never need all of the space of the entire drive for a single session.

[Gene100]

Thanks for that. Someone else has indicated that the split a 1TB into 2 partitions.

Might just continue as i have been with all audio streaming from the same partition.