more than two dedicated audio drives???

[xodiac]

we know performance increases with a second dedicated audio drive to throw audio into, however ... has anyone tried using 3 audio drives for anything? if so, how did that work out?

[audiogeekzine]

Yeah why not. Although you aren't going to have enough tracks simultaneously playing to need to.
Lets say you have 4 drives to record to, you can set the disk allocation to automatically alternate which drive it records to. Its called Round Robin. Example. Track 1 goes to disk 1, track 2 goes to disk 2, 3 to 3, 4 to 4, 5 to 1, 6 to 2 etc.

I would use this when recording 20 or more tracks at once on an HD system, no need to on an LE system. One dedicated audio drive either internal or firewire will do the trick just fine.

[xodiac]

so having more than two audio drives wont increase performance?

[audiogeekzine]

I doubt it will for lower track counts, it will just complicates archiving sessions and increases the likelihood of you losing files.

[3JDamon]

I have three audio drives, but I don't usually use more than one at a time. I generally alternate between two and use the third for short-term back-up, but the third has seen some action when I've had 4 projects on the go.

With SATA and NCQ it's not necessary to share the load between two or more drives, as far as PT LE is concerned. One 7200rpm SATA/NCQ drive can handle 32 tracks of 24/96 no problem. NCQ solves the access speed issue for high track counts, and overall throughput was never an issue. 32 tracks of 24/96 is only 8.8MB/s.

What can choke up a drive is high track counts and samples. Samples should definitely have their own drive.

[Petander]

What can choke up a drive is high track counts and samples. Samples should definitely have their own drive.

+1

[xodiac]

cool, thanks to everyone for the input. anyone found any probs with the western digital raptor-x 10,000rpm 150gb sata drives? ...they look mighty tasty.