external hard drives?

[cptfiasco]

I am looking into getting an external hard drive, wondering what you may suggest. I have been researching about Glyph drives(Glyph gt key 750gb fw800) ...trying to free up space, speed up time.My amd64 phenom8450 triple core is very fast but, with only 73%disk space available on my Pc,the external hard drive would greatly enhance the triple core processing.So my question is , Are you using a external hard drive?,if so What kind?,and did it make a Dramatic difference(processing speed)? ...oh the 27% used space is 7% sonar projects and 20% the saved threads on how much the sonar projects sucked ! lol lol lol

[frshtrx]

a couple considerations - The train only moves as fast as the slowest car...

where or why do you think an external drive will enhance cpu processing? triple cpu processing is segmented in the system from the disc location-
as far as the system board is concerned, you are just routing the data i/o to a different bus, and depending on the connection type, the bus bandwidth could be smaller than the internal, hence, slowing throughput. theoretically. In practice, I would think the read/write cache ram on any drive these days should be able to keep up with any processor, even yours. but maybe not with Sonar, which may be capable of running like crap even on an entire server farm of cpus. I haven't checked that yet.

But that might also highlight the spec you'll want to consider highly - the amounth of i/o cache on the drive you're considering...

another thought - when going for a big external drive -
um...bad analogy alert #2....when setting out to avenge a death, dig two graves...or something like that...
all drives die, it's not a matter of 'if' , it's a matter of 'when'...

so ...if you plan on filling a drive that big over let's say... a year or two of recording...buy a second drive to back up the first on at least an infrequent basis - maybe monthly - 'cause it's going to take a long time even to do incremental back-ups of that much space...
it would be a real shame to invest so much time in the labor of filling up a big drive and when it dies not have a back up.
don't let this happen to you - when you buy a big drive, also consider how your disaster recovery plan.
if you do this from day one, you don't have any worries...if you think about it when the drive starts to make funny clicking noises, it may be too late.
I've had ex-drives last for years, others, unfortunately a few months.
life's a box of chocolates?

[brandondrury]

On my main rig, I use a desktop and use internal drives for everything. C: has the operating system. E: has all audio files. F: has all samples and backups.

At the end of each session, I paste the band's folder in E: to F:.

This system has served me very well for years. On a laptop, I'd use a similar method but with externals for E: and F:

Brandon

[garageband]

I heard you considering spending crazy Glyph money. You don't need to. You would be paying for the fancy box: "Quiet Metal Technology" and stuff.
Go down to Staples and buy a nice FW drive on sale, take it home and plug it in. Record your projects to that drive.

The following time you need an excuse to go buy something, buy a large USB drive for backing up your files.

Why one FW and one USB? Different busses and different computer resources to manage each. If you have a lotta crap hooked to your computer, it'll start to make a difference. I'm sure somebody will want to pick a fight over that. Whatever.

[garageband]

The more general point is that your system drive has a lot of spinning plates on sticks already to run the OS and any other software and hardware that's going. It's not useful or necessary to burden that drive by making it do triple duty reading and writing audio data in real time. In fact, if it's a 5400 drive on a laptop, that sort of nonsense will shorten the system hard drive's life considerably. How much? Mess around and find out.

[Audio~Geek]

Glyph drives are a waste of money.

[copied from a post I wrote in the Pro Tools forum]
You should be able to get a good external hard drive for not a lot of money (if it works perfect, it's priceless IMO).

What you're looking for:
TI Oxford Chipset (911, 912 or 942)
Firewire 400, 800, or eSata (depending on what ports you have available)
7200 RPM

• Lacie D2 Quadra 500GB $129 (one of the most popular drives for professional audio recording)
• OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro
• My Book® Home Edition
• My Book® Studio Edition
• Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme
• Seagate FreeAgent Pro

You can get your own enclosure and buy any size drive to put in it.
Macpower - Home / Storage Solutions / 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosures / Product Index

[frshtrx]

oooh...<duh> right. separate the application drive from the scratch drive for the record/play data. Yes, good idea, has only a little to do with the cpu specifically, but will be a big improvement for the application performance.
Well said, GB, thanks for the clarification.

[cptfiasco]

I should have boiled it down to the problem I was having in sonar..alot of cpu usage (peeks at 30%..that's unusual)with the project file around 1.5 gigs. I started experiencing clicks and pops. First I changed the IO buffer size to 512,that helped.In the sonar forum I picked up on something that worked a little to my advantage, deleting the metronome track.I will definitely not waste money , just get an usb e.hard drive for storage of other shite on my cpu ......then again it could be the vista shit hogging precious energy....or the the fact it is connected to the internet,...or just maybe ....

[garageband]

Unless I'm using a virtual instrument real time or doing a lot of editing, I keep my buffer quite high at 1024 or 2048. If deleting the metronome track makes a difference, you've got some serious performance issues. I'd look for a way to lighten up your OS and make sure you have crazy (2GB or more) amounts of RAM. Also, having a lot of soundfiles in your project tends to bind things up.

[spaceatl]

Originally Posted by cptfiasco

I should have boiled it down to the problem I was having in sonar..alot of cpu usage (peeks at 30%..that's unusual)with the project file around 1.5 gigs. I started experiencing clicks and pops. First I changed the IO buffer size to 512,that helped.In the sonar forum I picked up on something that worked a little to my advantage, deleting the metronome track.I will definitely not waste money , just get an usb e.hard drive for storage of other shite on my cpu ......then again it could be the vista shit hogging precious energy....or the the fact it is connected to the internet,...or just maybe ....

Make sure that your Sonar is all up to date, as well as any other system drivers...I have an older K7 system with Sonar 5P, EMU 1820 and 2x UAD1 cards. For example, there are specific software updates for the UAD1 cards that address CPU thrashing in Sonar caused by the UAD driver. There are two updates for Sonar 5P and each of those address CPU utilization as well...

Does your system have a PCI bus? Are you using it for audio? This can manifest in few ways even on newer systems...Typically, the USB root hub will be sitting on a PCI bus, even if the MB has no such slots. Even Firewire can be sitting on a PCI 2.0 bus on a new MB...The good news there is that you can possibly tweak PCI bus latency for that device and allocate more time for it on the bus...My system is a bit older and all my hardware is PCI (not PCIe) and tuning the latency timers for my hardware gave me nearly 20%more out of my old K7 CPU...

FYI - PCI latency timer has nothing to do with latency in terms of audio playback...It's the amount of time the IRQ gets on the bus when the interupt occurs...

Here's a link...PCIe does NOT have such timers and can't be adjusted...Basically, when you run the tool if you see timer values of 0 then those cannot be adjusted.

PCI Latency Tool 3.1 v2 download from Guru3D.com