Sometimes the most innocent sounding questions can potentially open a big can of worms. I predict this is one of those.
“Why do many audio apps recommend using a separate SCSI drive for audio files?”
There are no doubt quite a few specific reasons I am not aware of, but a few general ones I do know include:
- It’s generally not a good idea to record audio on the same drive as your OS and other applications. How truly bad it is in practice depends on how your audio program works in terms of allocating and using hard drive space, but if you have a choice it is never recommended.
- SCSI drives are sometimes specified by applications because they want to help ensure a minimum level of performance. It is assumed in some cases that SCSI will provide a known minimum level of performance that the manufacturer can sort of build the product around. Nowadays there are plenty of situations where some SCSI drives are easily outperformed by other protocols, but sometimes the performance of those alternatives can vary quite a bit with the system they are in so the tolerances of the system have to allow for that. When in doubt some manufacturers call for SCSI even though it may not really be necessary.
- In some cases a specific model SCSI card and drive are recommended. In those cases it is always best to adhere very closely to the recommendation. In other cases you will see a more generic reference to something like Ultra SCSI, or any of a number of other protocols. In those cases you have room to move around and try a few things that may even be outside of what they recommend, but you must understand that the further you get off the path the more risk you are at in terms of reliability. We’ve seen many systems not perform nearly as well as they should over the years due to improper drives, drivers, SCSI cards, and even cables.
- Don’t assume faster/better performance is always better. We’ve seen instances where people put very high performance SCSI hardware in their computers that end up hogging computer resources to an extent that the computer is unable to properly process the audio data.
- And this one is the bottom line. Manufacturers can’t possibly test their product in all configurations with all possible systems. The best they can do is pick a few likely scenarios and test for them. Your best bet is to stay as close to their recommendations as possible simply because you can be assured the exact system you have has been tested and is known to work. Deviate at your own risk.