Hard Drive Suggestion

[BISHOPA3]

I have a Gateway computer. P3 800mhz, 512 ram, 20 gigs. I want to add another hard drive for my audio. Can someone please suggest a hard drive for me? I plan on purchasing the Digi 001.

[Justin]

Well, are you going to need to move files between this and any other machine?

How many drives do you have hooked up internally? Do you have room on your IDE controller?

Do you have a firewire card?

Give us some more info and I'm sure you'll find lots of suggestions available.

[TeeCee]

How much do you want to spend? Most of the current 7200 RPM IDE drives are fine, it's mainly a matter of preference. I like Maxtor and IBM, but not the 75 GB IBM 75GXP as it runs hot and fails. You should try to find out what DMA level your IDE bus is at (DMA33, DMA66, DMA100). It should be in your documentation.

[pecos]

Howdy,

I'm not the one who asked the original question, but I'm considering doing something similar.

I've found that my IDE controller supports DMA33. I presume this means that a new hard drive will not perform up to spec. Does this mean that there's no point in installing a new drive in this system? I don't suppose it's possible to upgrade the IDE controller without replacing the motherboard.

Thanks for any help.

--Tom

[Justin]

It's possible to put a new ide controller card in and connect the drives to that, but your system bus would be the limitation as to whether or not you see a significant boost in performance. Check your manual and find out what type of motherboard is in the system. Then let us know what you find out.

[AcousticPro]

Or just put in a firewire card and get a Glyph drive?

[pecos]

Here's what I found:

System chip set: Intel 440LX PCIset

Data bus width: 64 bits

Address bus width: 32 bits

DMA channels: 7

Interrupt levels: 15

System BIOS chip: 2 Mbits (256 KB)

System clock: 66 MHz (matches external processor speed)

Diskette/communications ports: 24 MHz from the system clock

Seems pretty primitive, I guess.

--Tom

[TeeCee]

With DMA33, you are limited to data transfer of somewhere just below 33MB/s. Can you live with that? Chances are, your new drive would not be that fast as you got to the inner tracks of the drive. Get the drive now and put in your new system when you get it. Or go Firewire, Serial ATA, SCSI, or whatever you want with an add on card. If you can properly use the built in IDE controller, you will keep the hard drive data off of the PCI bus. This frees up the PCI bus for audio cards and DSP cards. Not that hard drive data has to be that much of a hog.

Double check on that DMA33 thing. I didn't think the 440LX chip set had DMA33. Or do you have an additional on-board controller? This would be most apparent by having more than 2 hard drive ports on the motherboard.

Good luck,

[pecos]

Yep, DMA/33. Can I live with 33 MB/s? Well, the idea is to set up this computer so that I can fiddle around with digital recording and hopefully learn something. It doesn't have to be state of the art, but it ought to be functional.

I never really paid much attention to all these details of computer hardware before, but suddenly with this technology it all seems really important.

Thanks for the help.

Oh, and BISHOPA3, sorry for hijacking your thread. I thought I was keeping it relevant.

--Tom

[TeeCee]

What is actually more important than it is generally given credit for is seek time. When the transfer rates are screaming like they are these days, it becomes a matter of how fast your hard drive can seek around to pick up the tracks. The bus should not be your limiting factor. I believe I've pulled about 20 mainly stereo tracks off of a 40MB/s SCSI bus. That was a fast drive, though.

[AcousticPro]

There are a lot of variables relating to hard drive performance. Just pulling tracks and boasting about the number is fine, but that is rarely all anyone will ever do with a hard disk based system. Edit density is the hardest thing you can put a drive through. Very few people have a valid test for this. Digidesign has come up with a test that does a good job of letting you know what type of performance you should expect under the worst editing and track conditions. I can pull 128 tracks of playback off a U-160 drive on a SCSI bus, but that doesn't mean I try to work the drive at that level, I would kill it pretty quickly. Just make sure you talk to someone who understands these details and can help you pick a drive that will best suit your needs based on the type of work you are doing.

[TeeCee]

Yeah, the results I was posting about were straight tracks plus FX and volume automation. When I'm in edit mode, I have more MIDI than anything else. And now, some soft synths. DR-008 works as a more flexible ER-1. I can sample as many home made sounds as I want instead of being limited to the four included drum synths.

:banana: :classic: I like the new smilies, but the second one may be taken wrong. That's not pointing at you, Jeff, really, and we're laughing with you not at you :cool:.