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]

First thing: have a few gig free, it's important! You need space on the drive for the virtual memory and for the filesystem to do its stuff, not enough room means slower system and eventual crash.

Well, in fact you should not have use the internal drive for audio anyway… you're slowing down your computer this way. You don't necessarily need something like the big disk, a normal firewire/IDE drive will give you plenty of tracks to play/record (in the 40-50 at least on firewire 400) so it'll be enough.

To choose a big disk enables you to have more tracks but the risk of failure is a square multiply. so it's not a good idea for reliability save if you back up a lot. Given the price, you're better of with 2 different drives, one you work with, the second you back up to Given the price of the drives right now, it's a way better option.

A 7200 rpm for the internal drive will:
- heat more
- use more power so less battery time if it's something you care about
- a faaaster drive, making the system snappier
- won't be way better for the track count when using the internal drive for audio
- will be way better for the swap file of the virtual memory
- 2.5" HD are pricy, don't spend your money on gigs you don't need
- anyway, if it's not already done, max out your RAM. It'll be the best for OS X, less virtual memory used, so a system/the apps more efficient and a little less need of the hard drive in the day to day use.

So, to sum up things:
- max out ram if it's not already done
- eventually change the internal HD if heat/consumming is not an issue but don't go for the largest, it'll be anyway for system/apps/non audio files.
- Anyway, turn ON journaling on the system drive, it's good in case of crash. I'm sure you turn it off… (it'll slow you if you use the drive for audio, it's important for the system drive though, not much for others)
- buy one or 2 FW drives, work drive and back up drive (ideally)

Another thing… when using IDE drives, don't power them on and off all the time, it's the killing path in IDE.

[bradondc]

I've got a gig of ram. On the system usage utility this rarely gets touched tho, would i benefit from more? What about striped raid? I didn't clarify this in my post but that's what i was getting at. I have noticed my computer slowin up tho, out of the box it was like the proverbial off a shovel. I was thinking lacie 250 gig. The porsche ones. You mention using the internal audio, will it be better with an outboard soundcard too? taking strain off cpu and harddrive? I have reason to believe i am getting an edirol ua-25 nxt week. will this help? 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.

[pushtobreak]

When you say use an external drive for audio, do you just mean for the actual audio files or for the program as well?

[mortalengines]

Typically, you want to keep your main hard drive as an Applications/Program drive. On my external drive I keep all my "sounds" (I mean loops,recorded tracks) in one place to stream from & record to.

[lepetitmartien]

NEVER put your apps somewhere else than the dedicated application folder on your system hard drive. Never move Apple apps from their original place either.

Some apps won't work as advertised if moved, and it can be a bore to update too.

Now audio files can be moved at leisure, and should be so.

There are ways to move securely user accounts or app folders around, but it's geeky and not necessary given the size of current drives.

[bradondc]

got myself a firewire hd now, ive put across all my loops and the application support file for garage band. Is this right?

got myself an alesis io/2 also. pretty nice piece of kit.

[lepetitmartien]

As long as GB knows where these files are, it's ok.