Drives You Crazy - Are two drives better than one?
This article outlines the advantages of having two separate hard drives for OS and audio data in a dedicated audio workstation.
Hard drive sizes are huge these days and amazing value for money. A single 500GB SATA II hard drive can hold your entire operating system and leave you space for over two months of single track recording at CD quality (that's over a week of continuous 8 track recording). Who would need another drive? Are there any advantages to having separate drives for audio and video recording?
Physical space has ceased to be an issue and even in terms of performance you'll be hard pushed to measure a difference in audio track count between a single OS/audio drive and a dedicated audio drive. However, there are some key advantages to having separate OS and audio drives that might not be immediately apparent.
Performance - Over Time
Computer performance, under normal usage, deteriorates over time. As programs are installed/uninstalled, data created, moved, deleted, files downloaded, photos captured, the data on your hard drive becomes less orderly - it fragments - and files from one application that should be together find themselves scattered across the drive making the drive heads work harder to read the data. This fragmentation can slow down program loading times and possibly interrupt data or audio streaming. Imagine working on a music project and you record a number of audio tracks on a weekend. During the week you do other things, email, letters, games, and then when the weekend comes around again to record more tracks to the same project. On a single drive your audio data will be surrounded by and split up by other data which will reduce the efficiency of their playback. This sort of deterioration happens slowly, over a long period of time but your system is gradually clogging up. This can be helped by regularly defragging your hard drive but putting your audio onto a separate drive means that it will always be free from fragments of other non-audio data.
Organizational
The OS drive is stuffed full of files and folders. From a purely organizational point of view it makes sense to keep your recordings separate. Having a separate drive for audio means that you will always know where your data is and reduces the possibility of accidental deletion that we all go through will files in our My Documents folder when having a bit of a tidy.
Security
Hard drives come with long warranties these days but drive failure is still a possibility. More likely perhaps is the threat from virus' or other internet nasties that can upset or even destroy your system. If your OS drive found itself wiped or fails to boot how gutted will you be if it also contains all your project data?
There are some key advantages to having separate OS and audio drives that might not be immediately apparent.
Backing up is of course the correct thing to do but having your audio data on a second hard drive greatly improves its defences from malicious attack and hardware failure. It's also far easier to backup your OS and audio separately - a small backup of your OS drive would take 10 minutes to restore whereas GB's of audio can take a very long time. There's also the "young fingers" factor - your 9 year old son or daughter might inadvertently screw something up in the system which requires you to reinstall Windows - is your audio safe?
RAID
One other consideration is the added performance of a RAID0 configuration. This uses two drives together as a single drive benefiting from being able to move twice as much data than a single drive. In reality this equates to a track count increase of about 30-40% and can also help with sample streaming. Using two drives does increase the risk of drive failure because if one of the drives fails all the data is lost - however, this is still very unlikely and you just need to ensure you have a regular backup routine.
Pro Tools LE
Digidesign require a single dedicated audio hard drives in order to achieve 32 tracks of 24 bit audio at 48kHz. To record 32 tracks at 96kHz Digidesign require you to have two dedicated audio drives. This is very unusual. Programs like Cubase or Sonar can achieve around 70-80 tracks of 24bit 96kHz audio on the operating system drive. Digidesign do not support recording audio onto the OS drive, neither do they support the use of RAID configurations - although in our testing both these options work fine.
All things considered, having a separate drive for your audio data makes a lot of sense - provides
enhanced performance, it's easier to find, easier to backup, easier to maintain and is less prone to
fragmentation and anything about computers that is "easier" is a really good thing.
Author
Robin Vincent
Robin Vincent runs Rain Recording (UK) out of London and is the CTO of Rain world-wide. In his tenure in the business of PC based audio production he as authored numerous articles, reviews and books on the subject.