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Hi all,

Well im considering replacing my drives and thinking of going with two Seagate raptor 7200 ATA100 8mb drives. There is actually a spectacular deal right now at bestbuy belive it or not, each drive at 80gig is $100.00 USD but there is a $50.00 rebate right now, so in essence each drive is only $50.00 thats super cheap for these drives no?

My other idea was to just go with one 160GIG raptor and call it a day

Whats your thoughts? single drive or dual drives? Clearly if I went dual one would be for audiop and the other for apps and data, where as the single drive would need many partitions, but basically the same over system.

I have heard drives over 80G tend to be more noisey.

Any thoughts? My other consideration was getting some new caviar drives, I have those now, but my 80g caviar is starting to make some very nasty grinding noises, so I think its time to act fast. My thoughts on the Raptors was that since my Caviar is making noise, maybe the raptor would last longer

Cheers!

I would always prefer 2 small drives to 1 big drive - it's safer and faster. I would not recommend to use RAID, BTW, it will double the risk of failure (striped RAID, that is - the best way would be to use 3 discs, for striped RAID + parity).

I totally agree with wsippel's comments. The only downside is more HD noise

I don't trust RAID at all, even in Mirror mode... I've seen weird things happen with them such as corruption of the directory structure, and mirroring a bad drive onto the good one.

IMHO, there's nothing safer than good old-fashioned backup regimes.

Yep, that's why I suggested to use a three drive setup with parity.
And RAID is great and very stable - if you use a real hardware RAID-controller, like ICP Vortex or stuff like that - but this is expensive equipment.

Thanks for the info guys,

I will start with the 2 (80)gig raptors, hope these drives work out better than the dying caviar drives I have. I am also considering moving from AMD over to P4 since I have 3 different DSP boards in my PC and I just cant cant seem to shake some pops and clicks. There is another user using the EXACT same 3 cards in his box with ACPI and HT running with out any trouble, so I may just take the plung and gran a D875PBZ and a P4 3.2G 800Mhz FSB.

Cheers!

I (for one) would never recommend buying an Intel-based system.
If you have performance or bandwith issues, get yourself an Athlon64, AthlonFX or Opteron. Those chips have more power, more bandwith and faster memory access than any Intel CPU currently available...

BTW, HT is just fake SMP, introduced by Intel 'cause of the very bad per-cycle performance of the P4 due to their incredibly stupid designed pipeline (the pipeline is to long, that design allows to push the MHz at expense of the overall performance). It doesn't really stand up to true multiprocessor performance, and it doesn't help most applications.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: wsippel on 2004-04-12 13:50 ]</font>

I looked at thge price point of the new Athlons, they can get upthere nearling 375-475 for the chip alone. My problem is, I have an XP2500+ right now with a gig of Crucial 400mhz PC3200 ram, in the box is an Asus A7N8X and a ScopePro, UAD-1 & TC Powercore, none of the devices are sharing any IRQs infact each device has its very own IRQ, nothing out side of the device its self uses the IRQ, and while it extremely little, I do find myself getting a random pop or click here and there, not a huge deal but when your tracking a 10 minute song and at the very end around 9mins you get this jitter it drives you crazy.

I have tried every last possible tweak I can think of with no luck, I have disabled everything there is in this PC that is not used off and installed in Standard PC mode. Now there is another user who has the same 3 DSP cards even same sequencer host and midi device I use who has zero issues, thats why I had considered the Intel.

I do realize I am taking a performence loss, but do you think knowing what I just said I am better off going with the newer AMD 64s or FX/opteron?

Aside from the random click I get everything works great, I am gonna try one last thing, I have dual monitor set up on an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with high resolution, like 1280x1024, maybe I should try and lower the resolution to see if that does anything..

Cheers!

Well upon more research,

The tyan s2875 board is a no go for me, it seems there is a optimization issue so far with the S2875 that makes it so the UAD-1 will not work with this board currently, now I do realize this is a CW forum but I have this card in my box aswell and could not get along with out it

It seems these boards are not optimized for audio/video use since they were disigned to be used as servers, in time this will change, but for now thats a loft price point to take a chance for the future..

Cheers!

Cheers!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Basic Pitch on 2004-04-12 14:50 ]</font>

Well, I own a Tyan S2875, and it isn't designed for servers, but for workstations (mostly 3D and video, and that's why it's named K8_W_ - K8_S_ would be a server board). This board is _very_ fast and stable. But there are other boards, of course, with Nvidia, VIA or SIS chipsets.

I don't have a UAD-1, so I don't know what issues there are, but it works great with my CW card - no problem so far...

Here is a snip of what I guess is the issue and what they are aiming at from Universal Audio..
-----------------------------
We haven't put together a full compatibility matrix for Opteron and Athlon-64 chipsets yet, however we have some preliminary information that can be useful for selecting system configurations. The chipsets available for the Opteron and Athlon-64 include the AMD-8131 (PCI/PCI-X), AMD-8111 (PCI), VIA K8T800 (PCI), and nVidia (we haven't tested this yet).

Based on out tests and feedback from our beta testers, the VIA chipset is by far the best available. It performs extremely well, and several on-line comparison reports have shown that Opteron and Athlon-64 systems using it perform very well. The AMD-8131 works, but it requires setting the AMD-8131 mode in the UAD-1 Meter, which improves UAD-1 DSP performance, but reduces host CPU performance because of issues with this chip's PCI bus arbitration logic. The UAD-1 works well with the AMD-8111, but some systems using this chip along with the AMD-8151 AGP controller do not. The Asus S2875 uses this configuration.

Based on preliminary reports on some of the Asus boards, we currently don't recommend them for use as DAWs because the system architecture is not designed for low-latency media processing (most are designed as servers, which are not suitable for use as DAWs for many reasons).

Based on our initial analysis, our position is that some HyperTransport-based systems have been released too soon, while others are generally not suitable for use as DAWs with or without the UAD-1. The problems are not due to HyperTransport or the AMD 64-bit processors, but rather the system chipsets and system bus architecture.

For trouble-free operation and best performance, we strongly recommend using the VIA K8T800 chipset, as this has demonstrated both superb performance in all applications, and is the benchmark with which all other HyperTransport chipsets should be measured.

For optimal DAW performance, regardless of system type, we recommend putting audio devices on their own PCI bus segment to avoid audio performance degradation. Since most high-performance systems typically have multiple PCI segments, this can be done easily. Keep in mind that nearly *all* peripheral devices in the computer are connected to the system using PCI (which stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect), either using internal PCI segments within a chipset, or sharing external PCI segments with the PCI slots. The best systems have multiple PCI segments to isolate performance bottlenecks.

For analyzing Windows systems, we recomemend using SiSoft's Sandra performance analysis software. This is available as a free download at http://www.sisoftware.net . For people insterested in full PCI system analysis, including bus topology and IRQ routing and sharing, we recommend using ApSoft's PCIScope, a 14-day demo version is available on-line at http://www.tssc.de .

Regardless of bus bandwidth and clock/memory speeds, the system chipset's I/O queue depth largely defines system performance. The more I/O segments there are in a chipset (memory, AGP, PCI, etc.), the higher this number needs to be to avoid delays caused by data transfers blocking each other.

Finally, it's very important to remember that the amount of money spent on a system has little to do with how well it will perform as a DAW. It's very easy to spend several thousands of dollars on a backbone server platform that will perform terribly as a DAW.

So, why not get an Athlon64 or FX and a K8T800 based board?

BTW, most of those problems should be driver-related, and since I use mostly Linux, I prefer AMD chipsets. The chipset specs are published and the Linux drivers are very well done and open source, so at least some of the issues are Windows-specific and fixed for Linux (or they simply don't apply)...


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: wsippel on 2004-04-12 16:38 ]</font>