Different Hard Drive Functions

[Shinywalrus]

Howdy, guys.

I've got a pretty new box that I'm using for digital audio production. I principally use a couple programs in tandem, Sonar and Gigastudio, the latter of which is a pretty demanding program that streams multi-gigabyte size samples from the Hard disk in real time. It uses a sync mechanism similar to DirectSound, so I was hoping someone might have some insight into how something like that actually works.

I'm currently running a PIV 3.06 on a P4G8X and have a WD 80 Gb Caviar and one of the new SATA Raptors. Is the performance benefit I would get out of putting the OS on the SATA drive enough to justify putting these streaming samples on the slower WD? Is there a sizable benefit to putting the OS on the faster Raptor?

I must simply admit I don't understand XP's demands on a hard disk and how it affects performance. I do know, however, that Gigastudio's manufacturer does not recommend storing the samples on the same drive as the OS.

Thanks if anyone has any insight into this. Not a big deal more than likely, but when you're dealing with 5 gigabytes streaming real-time from your hard disk...

 

[everman]

It sounds like you need all the speed you can get out of your HDs. So I'd put the OS on the slower drive, and all of those large files you work with on the Raptor. I do hope you have a lot of ram though.

 

[Shinywalrus]

Thanks for your reply. It's what I've been leaning toward doing.

Interestingly, the way it streams from the hard drive, it only loads 64k to the system memory for every sample, regardless of its size. Something about running in the kernel, though my understanding of OS-architecture is very limited. 🙂

 

[isaacmacdonald]

that's my vote as well. I've been using samurize for two weeks now, with stats for disk write/read for each HD. XP very rarely reads from my system disk, so I'd venture to say that, with the exception of boot time and possibly paging (if you're low on ram), there's not much point in dedicating a fast drive to the OS.