Finally Starting to plan my new PC. help/advice appreciated

[Yogimeister]

P.S.

Apropo 4-head .... i actually think I will be moving from 2 screens to 1 big one (and perhaps a side mixer/scope monitor ... (For ergonmic reasons - e.g. I find I usually stare at the left part of the left monitor ....

[garyb]

1. a normal backup is plenty. heck, no backup is probably plenty. even old reel to reel tapes were subject to physical damage, there isn't a 100% safe solution. life doesn't work that way. how many hundreds of millions of dollars are your tracks worth that you can't just do a backup while you sleep(if you're nervous).

2. are you scoring major motion pictures at 96k or higher with three computers and 100's of tracks? because you will definitely run into hard drive limitations. the length of the tracks doesn't matter. why make the machine things more complicated and spend more money than is needed. i'm sure the geek at the shop(who is probably a really good guy) would really like to go all out, but i haven't considered using RAID since i needed to run SCSI harddrives for music data because they were the only drives fast enough for more than 5 or 6 tracks. RAID is for servers, although back in the win98 days, it was the only way to get a high track count.

really, the redundancy doesn't help you make music or keep the data 100% safe. it does add a small margin of safety, but actually an external backup might be safer since it's got a different power supply and is in a different physical location. also, there is a very small performance hit involved in mirroring drives which may or may not affect your DAW's performance. i'd say that i would expect you to hardly notice, if you noticed at all, but the demands of audio activity can be very different than serving data to a network.

i'm sure that there are people here using RAID and i'm sure there are valid reasons for it, but for a DAW it's not very important. the current drives are super fast. and you can play quite a few tracks at once. you have a separate harddrive for programs and one or more for music data, right? many people add an SSD or two for sample playback for programs like Kontact or Reason.

[Yogimeister]

Thanks Gary, by Track length I meant "too large for mem storage" ... but again .. 16GB is alot ...

I DO run track-counts of 100+ tracks sometimes (my guess is around 50 simultaneous) - and currently (on my XP + cubase with 7200 drives) I do see some heavy HDD loads sometimes ....
(but those are not the track counts you were talking about ...


Regarding the separate HDD - I was also going to ask about that ...

The current build is a 250GB Samsung SSD (for OS) - and I was thinking whether I should put Scope and cubase and the plugins on that as well ....

2x 2TB HDD for Projects/Samples (Can be RAID or can be split to one HDD per each)

1 x 2TB HDD - for general storage, yet another Projects backup and other Shenanigans ....


What do you think ?

[garyb]

nothing bad about all that storage, but it sure is a lot. it will take some time to fill it....

[w_ellis]

In my experience RAID is actually just a recipe for losing data. The problem is that (and this isn't true of all RAID modes) the data ends up being held on disk in a way that can't be recovered without using the RAID tools. If something goes wrong with the configuration (as has happened to me in the past), you can end up losing all the data with no means to recover.

We now use SnapRAID, which is a different concept that takes a snapshot periodically (daily in our case), rather than running all the time, so we can still recover from drive failures, but we are at risk of losing a day's work (which in our case doesn't really matter).

Then we also back the important stuff up onto a separate PC and the really important stuff to dropbox too. Hard drives are ridiculously cheap now, so go nuts

P.S. Re. the Nvidia Quadros, don't be fooled by the name, you can get ones that output to one or two monitors, it's just branding. The main advantage is that they have a totally different driver from the regular Nvidia graphics cards, which is coded for stability instead of intense gaming features.

[garyb]

but get a 4 head one...

[Yogimeister]

Thanx for the great info guys ...

Yeah ... The raid thing was totally not my initiative - but i was sold on it because I imagined it would allow twice the hdd-read bandwidth (totally not sure I actually need it ... So I can start without it and upgrade to a RAID if the PC has a hard time ....

Regarding the storage - yeah ... Its alot ... But I did go all out since on my last two workstations - storage space was kindof scarce so initially - I didnt bounce at all and just left things as MIDI (with offline export) - and now with the scope and another HDD - I tried not to do full-song bounces and alot of workarounds to minimize the project sizes ....

Now I can go full on bananas ....
Man ... This is going to be a big step up for me I reckon ...l yay !


And thanx for the tip about the quadro drivers .... i had no idea ....
(I think I have a quadro on my DELL lappy .... On the old PC I have a dual-head Matrox ...)

[Yogimeister]

Lol .... @GaryB

Any advantages to a 4-head besides having the option for your workstation to look like the bridge on the starship enterprise ?

[w_ellis]

For reference, all the RAID types are quite different in terms of how they work and what features they offer...

RAID-0 = Striped, which means the data is spread evenly across the two discs for improved performance (dependent of type of workload). If one disc fails, you lose all your data from both.
RAID-1 = Mirrored, which means the data is stored on both. Gives you half the capacity of the two drives and can negatively affect performance (although not usually)

You can also do RAID-5, which is like a variant of RAID-1 that saves you from data loss in case you have 3 or more drives and one fails. However that will definitely affect performance and has the problem I mentioned above.

[Yogimeister]

Thanks Ellis ...

Im referring to "Mirrored" mode for 2 HDDs ...

I just imagined in that case the DAW could read data from two places on the *common-virtual" HDD simultaneously ... thus doing even more than "doubling" my HDD "bandwidth" ...
(I understood from the guy in the shop that simultaneous writing is not possible)

[jksuperstar]

Don't forget, new HDDs will have higher read/write throughput than something 10yrs old, even if the SATA version is the same. This is even true for 5400rpm drives compared to 7200rpm, since most of what is done with audio is sequential anyways, the seek time improvement of 7200 is wasted.

So 1 drive hand ng your 50 tracks then, will be outperformed by something recent. BUT! Keep this drive for audio only, and you won't fragment those streams with updates and stuff like samples that get modified. Use plays a key role in the performance you get in the long run.

I would recommend samples on your SSD. They most often are written only when edited/updated, but read very often. Perfect data for SSDs. Same is true for SCOPE projects.

(Edited late night phone input errors)

[Yogimeister]

Thanks JK (you Superstar )

Good tip about the sequential reading and fragmentation

Two things I dont totally understand though ....
1) the audio(bounces)/projects drive will probably be fragmented because I do edit samples (with cubase offline processing) after creating them (and sometimes after long periods of working on other projects) .... But I can always defrag it regularly ... Do u thing a regular defrag will do the trick ?

2) not sure what you mean by "Use plats a key role in the performance you get." ... (do u mean keeping the data streamlined - beyond the bare HW specs ?

Anyway - I am currently more on the "many small samples" side of things - once I have all that HDD realestate I will probably get lazy and start bouncing whole tracks (with the silent parts) - instead of going around and bouncing the small blocks that make up the existing parts of the arrangement - and avoiding the silent/empty parts ....
Thats why I thought the improvements in "seek time" would be the dominant factor ... And "double bandwidth" in the sense that you can stream two streams from different locations on the HDD simultaneously ....





3) I am not sure if I currently have the budget for keeping my samples on an SSD at the mo ... (I actually dont have so many HUGE libraries - and I mostly copy the samples to the project's audio folder anyway - but I will definately keep it in mind as now, with Win7 and 64bit I am entering Mega-Samplers territory ...
I do plan to keep SCOPE and all the devices/projects on the main OS SSD (250GB) though ... Possibly along with the cubase dir ....



Thanks Again

[Yogimeister]

Btw @Gary - I basically will have 2 video outputs on my MOBO and then the video card outputs (I wonder if they will work in tandem ...

[garyb]

don't defragment.

get an older quadro for next to nothing and then have a 4 head card(i use 3 monitors). there's noting like having everything in view. just make sure you get the needed adaptor cables.

or just use the built in graphics. it's not like your audio apps need anything fancy.

[Yogimeister]

Cool , thanx ... Ill check whats in stock here ....

Regarding defragging - even if its a "File/folder-structure" based defrag (rather than frequency-of-use or other methods ) ?

[garyb]

you don't need to do it.
i haven't defragmented in many years. NTFS in win7/8/10 is not FAT in win98....

[Yogimeister]

Ok ... Thanx

(My current build has a russianovich defrag running on every startup - thoguh it usually just checks and skips defrag ... If I dont abort it before that ... )
(It was built and installed by a "pro audio" pc-builds shop back in the day .... )

[w_ellis]

My general advice: wait until you have a problem and then deal with it You'll probably not need to do anything clever with a new PC to get it to do what you need with digital audio.

The easiest solution would be to just get a bigger SSD and then you can take longer before worrying about archiving off data, usually by the time you're no longer actually working on it. Here in the UK, you can buy a decent 480GB SSD (Sandisk) for about £120 (or the 960GB equivalent is £230).

One thing to note though, is that you shouldn't defrag an SSD... it's actually not good for it. Instead, you need to make sure that TRIM is enabled. I think that's done automatically from Windows 8 onwards, but in Windows 7 you just need to run the Windows Experience Index. This site has some useful tips: http://www.helpwithwindows.com/Windows7 ... page2.html

[tlaskows]

Windows 7 enabled TRIM automatically on mine...

-Tom

[jksuperstar]

Yes, win8 and onward not only use TRIM, but try to optimize installs to SSDs vs HDDs. Also, Windows auto defrags, unless you have disabled this feature to minimize processes & services in the background.