Hard Drive and RAM questions

[greatzed]

I\'m currently building a computer, and I\'ve got the hard drive down to 2 solutions:

1. Seatgate Barracuda 7200.7 120GB (Serial ATA, ATA/150, 7200 RPM)

2. Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB (IDE, SATA, 7200 RPM)

Are these hard drives alright for running gigastudio and sonar on one comp.? Also, about RAM, I\'ve got it down to Kingston 1GB KIT 400MHZ DDR PC3200 DIMM 3-3-3. Is this alright?

Thanks!

[JonFairhurst]

If the machine will be in your listening area, get the Seagate - it\'s the quietest drive on the market. If the PC\'s in the next room, toss a coin.

[Jared Hudson]

You should be fine with those. I\'m a big fan of the Western Digital Special Edition\'s, but as long as the drives are 7200RPM and work...you\'re good. A gig of RAM is right at where you need. PC3200 will do just fine. One of my friends who\'s majoring in computer technology and network systems, says that when you use the 3rd RAM slot on your board, it can create all sorts of problems. Anything from long boot times to random restarts. If you have one of the N-Force 2 mobo\'s then you should be able to use the dual ddr function. And yes, running Gigasamples on a separate hardrive from the OS is a wise decision. It\'ll keep your polyphony and voices up (did I say that right?). Anyways, your setup should be strong.

I\'m going to be purchasing 2 Western Digital 120GB SE\'s, plus another stick of Samsung 512MB ddr333.

Jared

[greatzed]

Great. Thanks a lot! My dad doesn\'t really like the Seagate stuff, but I don\'t see any reason why he wouldn\'t. I\'ll probably get a couple of those. images/icons/smile.gif

[DevonB]

Originally posted by greatzed:
Great. Thanks a lot! My dad doesn\'t really like the Seagate stuff, but I don\'t see any reason why he wouldn\'t. I\'ll probably get a couple of those. images/icons/smile.gif <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Seagate hasn\'t had real issues since the days of 20 meg MFM/RLL drives that I\'ve heard of. Since then, they\'ve been quite solid drives, and haven\'t heard complaints about them. Why doesn\'t he like them?

Devon

[greatzed]

I misunderstood him. He meant some drives that aren\'t meant for professional use are basically junk. I guess Seagate made some non-professional drives that were crap.

[JonFairhurst]

The only problem I have with Seagate is that their drives are rarely on sale at Frys. WD pricing has been much more aggressive.

[Simon Ravn]

Seagates are great. After having to live with noise problems with WD, so-called new noiseless Maxtors, IBM\'s etc, I am only buying Seagates these days. The only quiet drives around.

[Alexcremers]

What about the 80 GB size limit per drive that Giga/Tascam recommends. Is everybody ignoring that?


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Alex Cremers

[greatzed]

Is that true?

Also, I\'m wondering when I buy a motherboard and a case, how do I know if the port slots on the case are going to match up with the ports on the motherboard? Right now I\'m looking at an Asus P4P800 Deluxe P4 and a LifeStyle Series ATX Midsize Tower.

[Simon Ravn]

You get a port plate (??) to match along with all motherboards.

[JonFairhurst]

Simon\'s right. ATX cases have a big rectangular hole in the back. ATX motherboards come with a custom plate to fill the hole.

BTW, Asus makes great MBs for audio - they have no fan. To keep things quiet, get an ATX case with no power supply, then get a Fortron 350W ATX supply from directron.com. Match that with an ATI Radeon 9200 (no fan) and Seagate drives, and you have a pretty quiet machine with parts that are known to work with GS.

[greatzed]

What if the ports are on the front?

Also, is it really better to go with an 80 gig. hard drive?

[Alexcremers]

Also, is it really better to go with an 80 gig. hard drive? <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">I would like to know also.

This is from Giga Newsletter June 2002:


3. Size: Keeping in mind that Giga instruments are rather large, you need to
make sure you get a hard drive that will give you enough room to put all of
your instrument data. The flip side to this drive consideration is that
although drives are getting bigger and bigger (100 GB and higher these
days), the components within the drive, specifically the platters that the
data is written to, are being made thinner to accommodate a larger storage
capacity in a traditional form factor. This is not unlike the analog
cassette tape issue, where the tape is thinner at 90 minutes and higher to
fit inside the plastic cassette housing. A drive streaming Giga instruments
will be working quite hard, so you don\'t want to go too far beyond the 60-80
GB size rating. <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">------------
Alex Cremers

[csduke]

Originally posted by Alexcremers:
What about the 80 GB size limit per drive that Giga/Tascam recommends. Is everybody ignoring that?
<font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Yes. I run two 120 GB WDs with 8Meg Caches. Applications generally don\'t know about HD size - they only ask the disk for files names and the disk/IDE COntroller translates that into sectors and such. The Kernel level GS code may know disk addesses though. I don\'t know but it\'s clear that GS works with 120GB drive - no doubt.

[Alexcremers]

Yes. I run two 120 GB WDs with 8Meg Caches. Applications generally don\'t know about HD size - they only ask the disk for files names and the disk/IDE COntroller translates that into sectors and such. The Kernel level GS code may know disk addesses though. I don\'t know but it\'s clear that GS works with 120GB drive - no doubt. <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Graig, it has to do with the drive\'s platters that are getting thinner. It\'s really a question whether the thinner platters are able to indure hard labour (disk streaming).


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Alex Cremers