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 | | | | Aug31Written by:D. Glen Cardenas
Thursday, August 31, 2000 6:00 PM  When it comes to picking a drive for a DAW, you have a bit of a job ahead of you.
We looked at the two contending controller formats in the last sections, but that's just an overview. What about the specifications? What do you need to know about a drive's performance in order to make an intelligent choice regardless of which format you're interested in?
As it turns out, the specifications of both the drives and the controllers can lead you quite clearly to the best choice so long as you don't lose track of what you're after. You want a disk for a DAW - not a file server - so many of the drive specs and controller advantages don't apply and others will count more heavily. On the other hand, you're not just going to be typing email or surfing the net on this system either, so not "just any old drive" will do.
Decision Criteria
To an extent, the drive format you have already committed to will be a big factor. If you don't want to support a large number of drives and CD devices, IDE will look like the best path to follow and SCSI will be much less appealing. If you already have SCSI, then the choice is clear.
If you are building from scratch, you should at this point have a good idea what CPU you would like to run, how much RAM you will need, what you feel is right as far as video, sound, and perhaps LAN cards go, and if you want an internal modem. Your choice of motherboards and disk system are now at issue.
Should you spring for SCSI and should you get a motherboard with built-in SCSI support?
Is IDE the best way to go?
Does it really matter?
We can't answer these questions for you, but we will give you better tools for reaching that decision yourself with less dependence on the common DAW disk superstitions, misconceptions and other people's unfounded prejudice.
Care and Maintenance is Still Important
Just for the record, no amount of care in picking a drive will offer you advantage if you don't do a few simple optimizing steps on your own.
For one thing, defragment your data partitions often. Keeping large file access sequential will allow your drive's performance qualities to shine. Also, store your data in the front tracks of the drive (first partition) or as close to the front as you can. As the track numbers get higher and the tracks get closer to the spindle, the "zoned formatting" of your drive will result in fewer sectors per track as you move toward the spindle. The more data you can pull from a single track, the faster the throughput. The outer tracks with the higher sector count will hold more data, thus offering up to 60% faster read/write throughput compared to the inner tracks.
For another thing, if you are using FAT16 partitions for your system, consider reformatting the data partition as a FAT 32 drive with the /z:64 switch. Assuming you've already fdisk'ed the drive as a FAT32 device, the proper format command is:
format d: /z:64
to format the d: drive. Replace the d: with the drive letter you wish to format. FAT32 with the /z:64 switch will remove the 2.1 gig partition limit while still giving you the large cluster sizes. Note that Windows NT cannot use FAT32 formatting, and NTFS uses small cluster sizes. Therefore, under Windows NT you need to format your audio disks as FAT16 disks or suffer a modest performance hit from NTFS.
However, Windows 2000 (NT 5 by another name) users need not suffer the constraints of NTFS because W2000 supports FAT 32. Keep in mind that if you're already a W2000 user and have already formatted all of your drives to NTFS, Windows cannot "un-do" an NTFS format back to FAT. You're stuck with it unless you're willing to either FDISK your audio data partition and reformat it or use a third party program like Partition Magic to make the switch.
That said, let's look at the guts of a hard drive.
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