two hard drives - where to put programs?

[TomK]

My computer has two 7200 ide drives. I need one partition for programs, one for CAkewalk audio, one for Gigasampler instruments. What would be the best way to combine this? I guess the question comes down to programs + audio, or programs + Giga, on one drive.

[nous]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by TomK:
My computer has two 7200 ide drives. I need one partition for programs, one for CAkewalk audio, one for Gigasampler instruments. What would be the best way to combine this? I guess the question comes down to programs + audio, or programs + Giga, on one drive. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Good question.
I know that with the purchase of my next drive it will be dedicated to audio only.
Reason being, I suspect, I don\'t want it
trying to access software when I\'m wanting it to just transfer audio as fast as possible.
Adding Giga to picture makes it a bit more complex it seems.
I hope we get some comments on this.
Regards,
Steve

[Doug Bircher]

I\'m no expert, but I\'ll tell you how I organized my two ATA 66 7200 rpm harddrives.

Drive 1: Partition 1 - operating system
Partition 2 - Cakewalk wavedata
Partition 3 - Gigastudio, Cakewalk, plugins, Aardark program,
Partition 4 - windows virtual memory and miscellaneous programs

Drive 2: Gigasamples

My thinking was that the Gigasamples should be all by themselves so nothing else would interupt the stream of data from that drive. Also, I expected to put a lot of samples on the hard drive, so I wanted to have lots of room. For Drive 1, the OS is in the first partition because I didn\'t know how to make it go anywhere by C:/. I moved virtual memory to a different partition so that the C partition could be small. I put Cakewalk wavedata on the D:/ partition so that it would be closest to the edge of the platter and the wavedata would stream off as fast as possible. After that, I organized the next two partitions just for convenience and organization for easy backup (all audio programs on one partition.

I put both harddrives on the ATA66 controller card, each one in its own interface slot, rather than attached to one slot with a master/slave arrangement. I did this because the ribbon cable was not long enough to connect them together in one slot as a master/slave. Not very scientific, but as far as I know, that\'s the best way to do it anyway.

That\'s it. I have no idea whether that arrangement makes for the best possible number of audio tracks, but it works, and I have no popping sounds or freezes running Cakewalk and Gigastudio simultaneously. However, I have not yet tried running both programs simultaneously with many audio tracks/midi tracks/plugins. I hope this helps.