is it the ram or the harddrive??

[G-Style]

im wondering, what slows down computers durning recording? i'm working with a gig of ram and a 100 gig harddrive (but i have around 10 gigs free space) my sessions are good for the most part, but when i start mixing, my comp freezes and my program crashes a lot. if you need more information, let me know and i'll explain futther. thanks.

[Raw-Tracks]

It's not likely your RAM is the problem. It could be the hardrive. A 100gig drive with only 10gig space is getting pretty full. Do you defrag your drive? That might help. Are your mixes using a lot of plugin? Does your DAW application have some sort of resource meter? That will usually tell you if your hard drive or CPU are being taxed too heavily. If it's your CPU thats struggling, you may need to increase your buffers (latency). I use ProTools LE and usually have my buffers set at 128 samples or less when recording, but set them all the way up to 1024 when mixing.

[AndyH]

RAM is very much faster than the hard drive of course. You might look at free RAM when your session is heavy (but before it freezer or crashes) to find out if it is all engaged, but I suspect RAM is not the problem if for no other reason than that many people mix complex sets with less.

Usage certainly will depend up the operating characteristics of the particular application, but audio files are large and generally need to utilize significant additional disk space while working. You could certainly add up the size of all the tracks you are attempting to mix to find the absolute minimum amount of capacity engaged. Any thing you do with them will consume considerably more. In other words you might do much better with 50G of free disk space.

[G-Style]

thanks for the answers. i finally have an chance to clean off my internal harddrive (because my external hard drive crashed and i had to reformat) so thats what i intend to do. thanks again.

[itsplayed]

thanks for the answers. i finally have an chance to clean off my internal harddrive (because my external hard drive crashed and i had to reformat) so thats what i intend to do. thanks again.

Please explain...Are you using an external hard drive as your system drive and your internal drive for audio?

[unmateria]

can you write down your COMPLETE system hardware, and at least the software you are using?