Hard Drive Recs and advice

[sonicolonic]

Hey folks, I'm new to the forum and haven't had a chance to intro myself in the noob section, but I have some pressing questions.

First, I was wondering what hard drives people like for performance, reliability, quietness, and price points. Or... just what y'all are using anyways.

Second, I'm in the middle of a kinda complicated 2-stage computer upgrade. I'm refurbing a new old system that'll be my temporary everything machine until I can drop some dough on a dedicated tracking machine for my home studio, 30 minutes away in someone else's home (my awesome parents to be specific). Anyways, this new-old system will end up being a mixing/everyday-use machine someday so I'm looking for quiet drives in general. BUT, I need 2 new hard drives for it, one for the os/system drive and the other for recordings (until I develop a more comprehensive scenario with an external drive for transferring files between the two locations). I've got the standard 2 ide channels and I've got 2 sata channels with RAID 0 and 1 to play with. SO, what should I be looking at?

I'm leaving out critical info I know, but I'm doing mostly live instruments, upto 8 channels in @24/96 with extremely little midi, sampling, vsynths, etc. I'm mixing in the box but also just bought a mixer and could be mixing 8 channels out of the box now too. Anyways, I'm planning on getting some rubber stand-offs for the hard drives to reduce drive/case noise. Any help pointing me in the right direction would be awesome.

Thanks guys, looking forward to getting to know forum members. I'm also pretty psyched to see what you cats think of my rig. I'll drop in the noob section soon, but right I've gotta get through a marathon shift at work so I can begin my 4.5 day recording vacation.

~brobri

[spm_gl]

Welcome!

I'd put the system drive on the IDE, the audio drive on one of the SATA. Don't bother with RAID, it'll give you more headaches than perfomance. Our recording system is very happy streaming 24 tracks to disk on a single SATA drive. You could also go for a (good!) hotplug-sata cage.
Currently, I can't recommend any specific HD's. I spoke to my computershop guy the other day, and he said at the moment it seems all manufacturers have some quality problems. But you're not running a 24/7 file server. For audio, the performance differences between different drives is not really relevant. 8 tracks at 24/96 is not that much data.

[Havoc]

Put the dvd on the ide and put both other disks on the sata channels. If you only have 2 of them then you can't use the raid if you want separate disks for os and data.

As for manufacturers, there aren't that much independend ones left and all are about as reliable. Sure there is the occasional bad series (like the deathstars of years back) but you will find that with all consumer products. As a fast rule: larger capacity and higher spindle speed means more noise and heat. But 2 drives won't be an issue. (unless you use large 15k scsi's)

[roaldz]

Welcome!
8 tracks at 24/96 is not that much data.

That´s right, not when you´re recording/playing. But it is when you´re zooming/loading the whole session! That moment, you can use the speed.

[sonicolonic]

Thanks guys, that makes things a lot easier for me. I did the math to figure out what kind of data bandwidth 8 channels @ 24/96 generates, and it wasn't as crazy as I thought it would be. There's a chance, if I can get the cards to play nice, that I could potentially double this, but I'm not worried. I'll just look for a good deal.

I have no problem not using RAID, just thought if there was going to be a bottleneck/performance issue that it might be an option.

I don't mind if a session takes a couple of seconds to load as long as playback is smooth, which I always try to keep boards packed with ram. Ultimately this'll be my mix machine and daily user anyways, so being the older not-so-state-of-the-art box is not a big deal for me, and isn't a big deal for me in general.

I'm using some pretty old/outdated gear actually, but it works and I think I'm getting a lot of bang for my buck. Lately I've been curious about how cost-effective people's studios are, in regards to gear cost, production quality and ultimately technique. But I guess that's the fun of it, for me at least, hah!

I'm buying a used hd tomorrow morning because I'm having my uncle and cousins come down for a good ole fashioned family hoedown to test this setup out, and I don't have any free drive space. I'll be making a more informed and less hasty hard drive purchase soon for the system drive, as long as this drive works out ok for storage.

Gotta catch some ZZZs so I can record all day tomorrow. I can't wait...

~mumbles

[sonicolonic]

Since my last post I've made a few purchases and found a new problem.

I'm using an Asus A7N8X-Deluxe. I bought a new 500watt Earthwatts PSU, a WD 320gb sata drive for data, and an 80 gb WD Caviar Blue for the OS. I tried to put 64 studio on the new hard drive but my cd was bad, so for the evening's recording I used my old IDE hard drive with Demudi on it.

My problem is that when I record @ 24/96 I get xruns in jack which I never had a problem with prior to any of these upgrades. Now I do, BUT it's only when I'm trying to record to the sata drives. I've tried different frame/period settings for days now, and I just tried my soundcard in every pci slot with no luck. Tonight, with the Demudi drive in there, recording to that drive I had no problems doing 8 channels @ 24/96 with 10.3 msec latency until the drive was completely filled.

What gives?

~mumbles

[Havoc]

So when you record with demudi to the ide drive it works, when you record to sata you get xruns. How old is that demudi install and what does it supports? If I look at the demudi homepage it says it is not active and that page dates from 2007. It could be you are running into a not completely supported chipset for sata or something like that. I would wait until you try it with a more up to date install before putting time into resolving this.

[sonicolonic]

Well, I was trying to install 64 studio and it gives me errors when installing software when it gets to tetex-bin. I tried skipping the rest of the step and installing everything else then doing a rescue boot but it says it can't read from the cd, which is a fresh burn, and my second attempt. The chipset is Nvidia nforce2 which I forgot to mention and expect to be at the heart of the problem. I had trouble recently running live or installing 64 studio and knoppix (and maybe ubuntu) on a newer 6 month old MSI p6ng with nvidia chipsets.

I'm going to do some reading on installing linux and nvidia chipsets. Thanks for your help.

~mumbles

[sonicolonic]

I checked the 64 Studio forums and the install issue may be unrelated... going to reattempt now.

~mumbles

[sonicolonic]

Got 64 Studio to install fine. Now I'm getting more xruns than ever. I did everything reccomended in the wiki related to the QuickScan script. Now I'm working on trying to get my soundcard from IRQ 20 onto IRQ 9, but it seems like the motherboard wants to use that for ACPI and there doesn't seem to be a direct option to disable it. Heading into work right now, will be working on this the next couple of days. I haven't tried the IDE drives since the install.

~mumbles

[GarryO]

Hi, Sonicolonic
here is something you could try:

As root user, edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file ( make a copy first! )
and add to the end of line that starts with "kernel" this: acpi=off
you might also try adding: noapic
From my my menu.lst:

title Debian GNU/Linux, kernel 2.6.29.2-rt11
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.29.2-rt11 root=/dev/hda5 ro acpi=off noapic vga=791
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.29.2-rt11


you might find that you have to physically turn off your box after this instead of getting auto-shutdown.

[sonicolonic]

I just tried that, and then tried the soundcard in every slot. I can only get the card to show up on IRQs 3, 7, or 11, and 7 and 11 are shared with the display adaptor and onboard SATA/Raid controller repsectively. I tried reserving some IRQs to try to force the soundcard to IRQ 9 (or 10 or 11 without having to share and apci off) but that hasn't worked yet. Still trying...

~mumbles

PS ~ Now I'm also getting xruns when running at 48khz, frequency varies depending on which irq conflict I settle on.

[GarryO]

I hope you get there!
For me, that ( irq 9 10 or 11 ) was unattainable.
I've got two pci slots, both in use (sound-card and ethernet card).
My choice was either IRQ 4 or 7 for sound card; IRQ4 being the slightly better but not ideal option. To get that unshared I had to use the boot settings posted above.

see: http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000262

I'm getting one-way latencies of 5.8 ms which is plenty low enough,
and can run at half that without problem.
The following might be of interest: http://ardour.org/node/1302
particularly Thorgal's comments.

Good luck!

[sonicolonic]

Thanks for the links. I've been through the first one, but the second one was new to me. My plan for tomorrow is to see what IRQ my display adaptor shares with the sound card, and try to trick it into splitting up the IRQs by putting in a pci video card and then picking the best of the remaining options for the soundcard. I can get it to land on 10 or 11 and as long as it isn't sharing that with the sata controller I think it'll work. Either way, I'm running out of ideas other than buying a new mb/cpu/ram combo.

I'm also getting quite a bit of noise on my recordings but there's a couple of things I can try to fix that, like muting unused channels. The sound quality is pretty garbage too... it pops when there are xruns and it sounds warbley like a tape. I'm just frustrated because my old crappy PCChips board gave me no problems like this. My workspace is pretty cluttered so I'm sure power/signal cables crossing are at least partially to blame, but I'm not even going to hunt those problems if I can't get the system running stable in the first place.

One last thing I can try, and for more than one reason, would be dropping a 6 month old MSI mb in my case and see how that runs. I bought my dad that computer as an upgrade, but considering his options and my limitations, I might just trade him for it. Plus his setup seems pretty unstable and I'm wondering if the power supply is shot, and he just needs an internet box anyways.

Bah... I hate computer upgrades.... too much info, too many changes, too little money.

~mumbles

[Havoc]

I'm also getting quite a bit of noise on my recordings but there's a couple of things I can try to fix that, like muting unused channels. The sound quality is pretty garbage too... it pops when there are xruns and it sounds warbley like a tape.

Record a few minutes and then look at it with a spectrum analyser, Audacity is fine for this. It will let you see what frequencies are messing it up so you have a better idea where to search. If it is 50/60Hz and harmonics you have power line breaking in. If you have broadband noise, then the unused inputs might be to blame.

Change one thing at a time, record some silence and check. That way you learn to identify the culpits and how to make them go away.

The warbling might be a completely different issue from the noise.