best hard-drive concept for logic daw

[monobeat]

I'd like to hear some different oppinions on "optimal" hard-drive setups for logic, considering both performance and data safety.

up till now i've been running my dual G5 2,5 with the system on the slave drive, using my master drive for my audio files. samples (esx24, vsl, etc. are parked either on the system drive or on a few fw 800 drives. the fw 400 bus is used for backups and advc-pro.

a few questions considerations that i've been having:

is it better to have the samples (exs24, vsl, addictive drums etc.) on the system disk of on an external fx 800.

is the master sata disk faster than an external fw-800?

anyone got any good raid solutions (not striped for speed but rather mirrored for safety)-i've been considering getting a lacie bigger disk tower. 2 terras in 4 hot-swapable 500 drives - all on the fw-800 port.

as i said happy to hear any ideas or experiences y'all been making.

cheers, w

[Lagerfeldt]

Unless there's some specific reasons for it I would suggest internal drives. It's usually slilghtly faster and often more reliable than any external solution, YMMV of course.

Keep your system on the first disk, libraries on a second disk, projects on a third disk.

I like to do manual backups and not rely on any automated process. I make physical copies of the most important stuff to spanned DVDs which are archived and at the same time a copy on an external hard disk, the less important stuff is only backed up on an external hard disk and most of it overwritten later.

The system disk should always be journaled of course, but depending on what DAW you're running you can disable journaling for up to 20% performance increase (via the Disk Utility). I've done this on my project disk which increased track count from around 100 to 120 tracks of separate individual stereo audio at 24bit 44.1 kHz.

[Umlaaat]

Originally Posted by Lagerfeldt

Unless there's some specific reasons for it I would suggest internal drives. It's usually slilghtly faster and often more reliable than any external solution, YMMV of course.

Keep your system on the first disk, libraries on a second disk, projects on a third disk.

I like to do manual backups and not rely on any automated process. I make physical copies of the most important stuff to spanned DVDs which are archived and at the same time a copy on an external hard disk, the less important stuff is only backed up on an external hard disk and most of it overwritten later.

The system disk should always be journaled of course, but depending on what DAW you're running you can disable journaling for up to 20% performance increase (via the Disk Utility). I've done this on my project disk which increased track count from around 100 to 120 tracks of separate individual stereo audio at 24bit 44.1 kHz.

i have a similar thread.. what does disable journaling do?

I have 2 physical drives in my dual 1.8. One of the is split into 2, one for system, one for samples, the 2nd drive is split into 3, one for each genre i'm doing.. basically for all Logic projects.

Do you think having samples and OS on one drive is slowing down my read/write time for songs?

I have one song that has 84 channels of vocals.. my vocalist tracked to a 2 track stereo file.. all audio, no exs or any vsts.. all exs's and etc were disabled... but after like 16 bars, playback stops due to d i.o overload.

[synthoid]

my suggestion would be to

-leave Logic and its libraries on the internal drive. my reasoning is that you want a setup where you can attach a different external drive for different projects without any hiccup in the installation

-put your project sessions on an external drive. this takes the load off the internal drive and it's good for organizing things to boot.

-journaling is well worth the hit in performance in my opinion; it is the next best protection to a UPS in the event of power failure, as it insures the integrity of the drive if it's shut down abruptly. it also saves a ton of time if you restart after such a failure, as the file system check is very fast

-eSATA is a great way to connect the external drives if you can. I'm using a Sonnet Tempo ExpressCard/34 with a MacBook Pro to attach eSATA drives, and it's smokin' fast. On top of that, it leaves the firewire bus free for audio interface duties.

-use a raid configuration on the external drives if you want top reliability. I think it's a waste, myself, unless you're tracking a prima donna who would get you killed if she lost a take or something. Backing up is important, RAID might make sense in a backup server, but I think it's overkill for actual tracking duties so long as you are doing real backups. I mean, unless you RAID the internal drive as well, you're not really bulletproof from disk failures even with RAID on the project drive.

hth,

-synthoid

[Umlaaat]

Originally Posted by synthoid

my suggestion would be to

-leave Logic and its libraries on the internal drive. my reasoning is that you want a setup where you can attach a different external drive for different projects without any hiccup in the installation

-put your project sessions on an external drive. this takes the load off the internal drive and it's good for organizing things to boot.

-journaling is well worth the hit in performance in my opinion; it is the next best protection to a UPS in the event of power failure, as it insures the integrity of the drive if it's shut down abruptly. it also saves a ton of time if you restart after such a failure, as the file system check is very fast

-eSATA is a great way to connect the external drives if you can. I'm using a Sonnet Tempo ExpressCard/34 with a MacBook Pro to attach eSATA drives, and it's smokin' fast. On top of that, it leaves the firewire bus free for audio interface duties.

-use a raid configuration on the external drives if you want top reliability. I think it's a waste, myself, unless you're tracking a prima donna who would get you killed if she lost a take or something. Backing up is important, RAID might make sense in a backup server, but I think it's overkill for actual tracking duties so long as you are doing real backups. I mean, unless you RAID the internal drive as well, you're not really bulletproof from disk failures even with RAID on the project drive.

hth,

-synthoid

but is an esata card with esata external drive faster than RAID or FW 800?

[synthoid]

Originally Posted by Umlaaat

but is an esata card with esata external drive faster than RAID or FW 800?

the eSATA card I've got supports RAID. eSATA is just a low-level protocol for talking to disk drives, like IDE or SCSI. RAID is implemented on top of such a protocol, so you can find RAID systems based on many different protocols.

I think that in principle eSATA is indeed faster than Firewire800 (I don't recall their bandwidths offhand), but as a practical matter I don't think there's much difference because the disk drives themselves are not fast enough to saturate either of them. I like the eSATA solution because it leaves the FW bus free for other stuff, but if you don't care about that then FW would probably be fine too. (You can get an eSATA expresscard for something like 60 USD.)

-synthoid