Hard Drive Size/spec Preferences?

[Mr. Kelly]

Hey All...

Must buy new internal OS drive.h

Do you guys typically have a preference as to what storage size of hard drive you use for your OS drive? Do you go strictly by the specs and latency time, or does the actual storage capacity of the hard drive have a bearing for you?

Here's why I ask: In the "older" days, it was theorized that a smaller drive was likely to have less problems, and perhaps have better performance than a larger drive.

Any belief in this nowadays?

[TOM@METRO]

These days for the most part, the smaller drives are older technology. I would get the Smallest Western Digital Black Drive I could find, and partition some of it for backing up sessions from the audio drive.

[Benoni]

You are in luck, Newegg has a special on the WD caviar Black 750GB hard drives. I use a 750GB for my main drive, but i partitioned the OS partition to 450GB. Use the other side for storage of odd and ends. Have another 750GB partitioned to 530GB for most of my Libraries (Kontakt, Morphestra, True Strike 2, ect..) and use the rest for backup of other files.

Then I have a 640GB Caviar Black SATA III 6Gb/sec 64 MB cache drive for the main recording drive. then a crap load of other drives.

The 32MB cache drives are great for Pro Tools. If you have an i7 with SATA III ports, then you could really benefit from the 64MB cache drives. However SATA III is backwards compatible with SATA II, you just wont hit 6Gb/sec plugged into a SATA II port.

Here's a thread I posted earlier today with the info.

$59 for Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB 32MB cache HDD.

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=277875

[Mr. Kelly]

Hi Tom,

Why the smallest WD Black drive?

I've been using Seagate drives for about 6 years, and have yet to have a recognizable failure. Any thoughts on Seagates?

That's exactly how I have my current OS drive partitioned... some for OS, the rest for back up!

Thanks for your thoughts.

[TOM@METRO]

Originally Posted by Mr. Kelly

Hi Tom,

Why the smallest WD Black drive?

I've been using Seagate drives for about 6 years, and have yet to have a recognizable failure. Any thoughts on Seagates?

That's exactly how I have my current OS drive partitioned... some for OS, the rest for back up!

Thanks for your thoughts.

Just a question of dollars, if you have the dollars in the budget, go with a bigger one and partition that. Right now my system drive is a small partition (80GB) on a 1TB drive.

[Mr. Kelly]

Great! Thanks Benoni!

Should be dragging out the wallet shortly!

What real benefit would the 64mb cache serve for PT? Guess I'm not entirely sure how cache works and how it would specifically be useful for PT.

My current drives are at 8mb and have performed well for 6 years. PT 6.4, tho.

Interestingly, I still have a Quantum Fireball 30 gig drive hooked up to my "household" computer, and it's run without a flaw for almost 10 years! And this was daily use, often for hours each day... Probably runs at about 10 rpm.

[Benoni]

here is a Quote from Stu_Computer over at techsupportforums.com when asked about HDD cache.


"A hard drive cache is onboard RAM used as a buffer zone to hold read/write data for the cpu.This increases efficiency by allowing both to do other things instead of waiting around. (Instead of doing a single task they can do multitasking). It's pretty much the same as the RAM on the motherboard, more ram is more efficient-and we see improved performance."