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.

[albee1952]

Round Robin made a lot of sense years ago, when you had a pair of 9gb SCSI drives in your PT rig. These days, modern hard drives are plenty fast and you can do 60+ tracks on a single drive. So not only do you not NEED RR anymore, you also can get seriously screwed over by using it. Its tough enough to keep track of all your audio on 1 drive, especially if you start linking to audio in other sessions, or make a filing error(which most of us do at least one time). My advice, unless you have 100 tracks going, avoid RR. There are several solid drives for recording(I like the WD Caviar BLACK, but any 7200 rpm drive with a 32meg cache should perform better than the rest of the average computer). As for partitions, I will split a large drive(1gb and bigger) in half for housekeeping, or I sometimes split my system drive and use half as backup(the smaller system partition is easier/faster to clone or image). With the 3 drives you have(assuming all are 7200 rpm and not "green") I would use the 250 for system, the 500 for samples and the 1TB for recording(and I might split that one in half) I would keep the firewire drives for backups and transfers, and save session copies of any important sessions to them(remember, if it doesn't exist in 3 places, it's not properly backed up).

[nst7]

There is a way to allocate your drives in a protools session to split your tracks over 2 drives if you decide to, without worrying about partitioning, or anything else. It simply assigns the tracks where you want.

But as Albee said, it's not really an issue unless you're going over 100 tracks with a lot of edits. I think the amount of edits will be more of an issue than the number of tracks.

I recently did a test just for fun where I already had a 48 track session with a bunch of plugins and some edits, and I selected all the tracks and duplicated it, making a 96 track session. I did this with a 2007 Imac and 1 Glyph external hard drive. It ran fine (though my CPU was at about 70%). So I think it would really take a lot to tax your Mac Pro setup.

[M-ManLA]

What Resolution are you guys recording at? Usually @ 96k, it is recommended for two drives.

[Gene100]

Thanks to you all for the info.

Up until lately I was runing LE 7.4cs10 on a 17" powerbook G4 with 2 gig RAM and a 1.67 processor. But I was running very edit heavy sessions with lots of plug ins and tracks repairing and cleaning up old analogue sessions from studios i used to work in (I cut my teeth in studios in the latter stages of the still strong TAPE era.......machine line up and all that craic!!) but am working in DAW format some time now.

When I installed some new IK Mulltimedia plugins and some AIR ones my poor ol' powerbook kinda ground to a halt like!

So even though my new (well new to me) Mac Pro is the 1st generation one it will be a marked difference I have no doubt and I'm looking forward to getting back to work.

Thanks again guys

Eugene.

[Stig Eliassen]

To backup a session with audio files on multiple drives (or just 1 drive), use Save copy in..., and include all audio files in the copy.

[nst7]

Keep in mind that those CPU intensive plugins are only affected by your computer's processing power. Moving to a new computer should help that, but splitting your tracks across 2 drives will not really improve that.

[Gene100]

Thanks all, yes I know that the processor speed, installed RAM, number of processors or cores has more to do with performance with regard the plugins. The 'save copy in' method should do the trick also.

I think I will not partition my system drive the 250 gig one.

I'm not sure whether to partition the 1TB one in two or four partitions.

The 500 gig I will leave alone or partition in two.

My two external 250 gig firewire drives I will leave one partition on each.

Enjoy the weekend folks! I'm gigging most of it myself.

Eugene