Independent HDs vs. Stripping HDs in New DAW

[mauryw]

First, large thank yous to Pete Leoni, Jose Catena, Bruce Richardson, hurchalla, Fat Stratplayer, and Mike Baker for filling my head with wonderful ideas about optimizing a 2 HD system in a cutting edge roll your own DAW. I have decided to follow Baker\'s advice and put 2 IBM 75GXP ATA100 7200rpm HDs onto a KT7-RAID motherboard (ATA100 capable) running an overclocked Duron 700, built and tested by Bill Jeffers at Outside Loop Computers. I want to optimize the system to run Cakewalk 9 and GigaStudio thru a LAYLA 20 sound card for a home hobby use DAW. For my personal use, it may not matter, but I enjoy learning the theory and practical purposes of optimization. So, which is best:

1) 2 independent 20 GB HDs, non-RAID, one with OS and Giga files and the other with CW and waves, or

2) 2 HD RAIDed - 0 to stripe 1 40 GB partition. or

3) 2 HDs RAIDed - 0 to stripe to several partitions, C: for OS, D: for waves; E: for Gigs and F: for programs.

I guess I like to bleed at my ability to be on the cutting edge. I am pretty stupid when it comes to interfacing all this hard and software but I am learning a lot and having fun spending money in a budget kind of way. I needed to pass on my PII 400 so the kids could do their home work. Thank you all for any advice you can give!!!!

[donnie]

Maury,

You raise some very good questions. For what it\'s worth I\'ll tell you about my setup situation. It may or may not be in the cards but after only a couple of weeks with this setup I am convinced that it, at least for me, is the way to go.
For years I had been a Mac guy who only did my music on the Mac. Then GS came along and I sold the old Mac to because of the possibilities of GS with my music. I quickly realized that even with a PIII550, 256 megs of ram, and 2 7200 rpm hard drives that there still had to be a better way. So just for the heck of it I borrowed a Mac from a friend of mine and hooked the two up via midi. Now I have GS controlled from Digital Performer on a Mac G4/400 with 192 megs of ram. It is absolutely incredible! I am working on a midi file of Festive Overture by Shostakovich right now to see how close I can get it to sounding like a live a recording and after two it\'s pretty darn close.
I know the expense of two computers is not cheap so this may be more fore the person who has a Mac and is thinking about selling it for a PC. My advice would be keep the Mac and buy a $1000 PC and dedicate it to GS. Believe me you will not be sorry!
Let me know if I can be of anymore help to you.

Sincerely,

Donnie Christian
DS Soundware

[This message has been edited by donnie (edited 08-17-2000).]