How to make the Fastest harddisk setup on mac

[Boe Larsen]

Hi DUC

Anybody got some good info on how to make the very fastest harddisk system on a mac?

Hardware raid? SDD disks? Internal 10.000 rmp?

I'm interested in the fastest system for audio (I'd love to get my DAE buffer down from 2 to 0 ) - not worrying too much about track count....

Best,
Boe

[joji]

I am curious to. because 7200rpm does not seem that fast and there must be a better way for stuff to load faster and samples to stream faster

[TVPostSound]

Western Digital Velociraptor.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=459

[studiojimi]

Originally Posted by DIAFXMX

Western Digital Velociraptor.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=459

nothing LARGER?

[drenkrom]

The fastest setup i have here is an external 8-drive RAID 5+full parity drive setup connected to the MacPro using an LSI SAS card and dual-link SCSI cables. Write speeds hold an average of 700 MB/s and read speeds are around 500 MB/s (yes, those are Bytes, not bits).

Of course, RAID is not supported by PT, so we're talking theory here. Of the supported setups, I'd think the 10K drives would give the best performance, but you'll never ever get near RAID performance. Not that you have to anyways. Those numbers are absolutely over-the-top for audio. We use this setup for Uncompressed HD and 2K. It is the fastest setup I've seen, though. I run a Velociraptor on another system and it's pretty darn fast for audio. Forget SSD's for audio, you do not want to go there.

[Shifted Music]

Originally Posted by studiojimi

nothing LARGER?

I for one use my raptor for a working Audio drive.

not a storage bin so the smaller size is fine.

If I have a couple projects going on at a time I can have a few sessions on it. . but I have a storage drive for most sessions that I need handy but maybe not directly working on at the moment.

The few in progress sessions on the audio drive get copied over to the storage drive when I am done for the day so I seem to always have 2 copies of sessions I am really working on at the time... a couple for me, a couple clients and a couple extras or whatever. . usually don't need much more on an active audio drive.

I do not use high bit rates though so even a large sessions is usually 3 gigs or less.

So it works for me.

[25ghosts]

Originally Posted by Boe Larsen

Hi DUC

Anybody got some good info on how to make the very fastest harddisk system on a mac?

Hardware raid? SDD disks? Internal 10.000 rmp?

I'm interested in the fastest system for audio (I'd love to get my DAE buffer down from 2 to 0 ) - not worrying too much about track count....

Best,
Boe

RAID 0 (ZERO)
You will need a hardware raid controller as PT wont allow recording to software raided drives. Aside from that you can get 4 (e)sataII drives and raid them to a ZERO. That will give you some velocity

[dr sound]

Originally Posted by Shifted Music

I for one use my raptor for a working Audio drive.

not a storage bin so the smaller size is fine.

If I have a couple projects going on at a time I can have a few sessions on it. . but I have a storage drive for most sessions that I need handy but maybe not directly working on at the moment.

The few in progress sessions on the audio drive get copied over to the storage drive when I am done for the day so I seem to always have 2 copies of sessions I am really working on at the time... a couple for me, a couple clients and a couple extras or whatever. . usually don't need much more on an active audio drive.

I do not use high bit rates though so even a large sessions is usually 3 gigs or less.

So it works for me.

I also use Western Digital Raptor 300 gigs , lots of track (over 180 playing back at once). I use it just like "Shifted Music " does.
Great drive, fast but not cheap. Also the WD 640 gig "Black" version is nearly as fast as the Raptor. Good for a second or 3rd drive.

[John_Toolbox]

If you're looking at SSD's, I think the best one available right now for mac is the OCZ colossus. It is something like 250MB/s Read and write. It has a built in "garbage collection" feature that free's up unused sectors when idle, so it doesn't degrade in performance over time like others. This happens independantly of the OS, so you don't need special software like TRIM for windows 7, etc to maintain optimal performance.

The Colossus appears to be 2 of the vertex drives in a RAID 0 configuration, which is why it has such insane write speeds.(All of the good SSDs like the intel x-25m and ocz vertex have incredible seek times/read speeds making them ideal for streaming samples... the write speeds are also impressive but not always as fast as some of the high end HDDs).

I've been using intel X-18m SSDs for boot drives and sample streaming drives for the last few weeks and so far I am 100% impressed. My i7 imac boots in 5-10 seconds.

[Boe Larsen]

A lot of interesting info! Thanks!