Dual Hard Drives? Why?

[Jasconito]

Hey all,

I was advised a while back to purchase a secondary drive for my system specifically for recording purposes. I now have a WD Caviar Blue as my main system drive and a WD Caviar Black as my recording drive. I was encountering issues prior to this upgrade (9073 errors or something) and they have since stopped.

Why is a secondary drive required for Pro-Tools? I understand that it is beneficial to performance, but I just don't understand why the errors occur if one is not present. Never seen anything like this working with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and other high end programs. Can anyone give me an explanation in lamans terms? Thanks in advance.

[Hotcrazyfruit]

Originally Posted by Jasconito

Hey all,

I was advised a while back to purchase a secondary drive for my system specifically for recording purposes. I now have a WD Caviar Blue as my main system drive and a WD Caviar Black as my recording drive. I was encountering issues prior to this upgrade (9073 errors or something) and they have since stopped.

Why is a secondary drive required for Pro-Tools? I understand that it is beneficial to performance, but I just don't understand why the errors occur if one is not present. Never seen anything like this working with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and other high end programs. Can anyone give me an explanation in lamans terms? Thanks in advance.

since protools works with many many audio files at once, there is a tonne of data moving around. its simply not possible for a single hard drive to supply data for the wave files, and host the operating system, and host protools ect.

Glad you got a working rig now!

Nick

[Jasconito]

Originally Posted by Hotcrazyfruit

since protools works with many many audio files at once, there is a tonne of data moving around. its simply not possible for a single hard drive to supply data for the wave files, and host the operating system, and host protools ect.

Glad you got a working rig now!

Nick

I understand that, and I realize it would improve performance exponentially, but how come software such as Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 will work just fine on a single drive? It just seems a bit weird. I am assuming other production programs have tons of data moving around also and they do it fine with one drive.

In addition, it seems like they removed this restriction from Pro-Tools 9 (http://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/self...p?DocId=380567). Am I safe to assume this was a programming flaw on the part of the makers of Pro-Tools LE?

Thank you for the information. I appreciate it. I'm just trying to understand my software

[Emcha_audio]

Having two drives has always been advised even in video editing. I do audio recording and mixing, while a friend of mine is actually very active as a professional video editor. And in both fields, it has always been recommended to have one system drive (including daws) and one media drive.

There is also a very very big difference with a program that is used in photography and those used in audio recording and video editing. The two laters are a lot more heavy on the bandwidth information being used.

[nst7]

The other thing for video or audio editing, is that there's a lot more wear and tear on the hard drive, when it's constantly skipping around trying to find different files. This will probably shorten the life of the hard drive. If you're always backing up your audio stuff, it's not a big deal if your hard drive goes. But it's a little more hassle if it unnessacarily happens to your system drive.

[remis]

Originally Posted by Jasconito

In addition, it seems like they removed this restriction from Pro-Tools 9 (http://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/self...p?DocId=380567). Am I safe to assume this was a programming flaw on the part of the makers of Pro-Tools LE?

I think you may have overlooked the sentence in the page you linked to near the top that says: "The following disk drives have been tested and approved by Avid for use with Pro Tools HD 9.0 and Pro Tools 9.0 as Audio Record and Playback drives."

[albee1952]

Consider what the system drive is doing all the time. It is working on finding and executing all your commands, plus there's a lot of stuff going on in the background that we are not even aware of. Then consider that all this is done with one playhead, accessing the entire drive(because files can be spread all over a drive-a good reason why drives need to be de-fragged now and then). Then look at the recording drive which needs to stream audio files(maybe 2, 16, 24, 48 or even 128 tracks). That playhead has a lot to do, so it would get really bad if it had to chase down software and program instructions at the same time. I bet if you tell Adobe PhotoShop to render a large photo file, it would not allow you to do much while its rendering. The system I am typing on(with a single drive and a dual core cpu with 4gig of RAM) gets really sluggish when I extract a large rar file.

[sw rec]

And think of it this way....how much is a good robust hard drive? $75? And how many ALBUMS can you get on that drive? 10? More? It wasn't that long ago that a reel of 2" tape was $110, and you only got 30 minutes of 23 tracks on it (had to give up one for time-code!) Plus, it was not advisable to EVER use that reel again. So I can't understand ANYONE having issue with spending a few extra dollars for a secondary drive. We are truly in a "best bang for the buck" situation here. And yes, even Photoshop works MUCH more efficiently rendering files on a secondary drive.

[Benoni]

Pretty much all Adobe products advise a "scratch" drive as well.

[_Wes]

Yes - as a systems admin - I agree. The speed needed for the disk writes, and monitoring the audio all at the same time requires the second disk. There is lots going on there. . . and the dual disk config. makes it possible. :)