To Raid Or Not To Raid Options

[bradondc]

I have nearly maxed out my internal hard drive on my mac book, so i'm looking for a new harddrive. Should I be woried aout getting one with raid built in suh as the lacie little bug disk or the maxtor one touch iii turbo raid? Or will just having 7200 rpm be okay? I have had disk errors in garageband and get the occasional 'here are to many tracks' warnings with the internal drive. Also, if i got a hub and linked up 2 hard drives would i then be able to use the software raid in osX? Thanks for your time cheers

[lepetitmartien]

With a gig, you OS X is only getting his vital space, the ideal for OS X seems to be in at least 1.5-2 GB of RAM so it's not the RAM size which slows it down, the more RAM, the less need for virtual memory (there will be always some used, but with more than 1.5 GB, the size of it keeps low for a long time, OS X memory management can be way more efficient). With more than one Gig you'll benefit of real estate for the plug-ins, especially the RAM heavy ones (instruments, samplers, some reverbs). Si if you can, max out.

Your computer slows down because:
- you eat up drive space it needs for caring about itself (virtual memory, BSD defragmenting, caches and so on)
- you may not let it do its own maintenance (like the BSD scripts wich launch at night at about 3:30, you can ask them to launch at another hour or by hand with some utilisites like OnyX, Macjanitor. It raises issues in the end, even if these scripts do very basic stupid tasks.
- using the internal hard drive for audio on a laptop is conflicting with the other tasks the OS and the drive have to do. You're straining it. Mind that then you're asking it to do on the same drive swapping virtual memory, reading OS and apps stuff, reading files, and reading/recording audio files. It's just way too much for one drive.

As I said, a RAID 0 will give you twice recording speed, but only nominal reading speed, you need RAID 1 for nominal recording speed but double access speed for reading (and increased safety along the way). What you don't understand is that IDE drives are speedy enough to care about normal projects without fuss. Now if you paln to work with 150 tracks at once, yep, a RAID then is an idea. if you work with a "normal" number of tracks (a few up to 40) RAID is not very important save if you plan RAID 1 for safety and reading speed up.

I was talking about the use of the internal drive for audio, not of the internal audio circuit which is "low end", you can get way better AD/DA thru dedicated audio interfaces. The audio i/o of the mac are made for office use, not serious audio recording (it's more for ichat, VOIP etc).

[bradondc]

So first i will get a firewire external harddrive. Then max out my ram. I already have onyx. then look at upgrading my internal hard drive. glad i know what i need now cheers.