PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hey everyone...

I was wondering if I could get your opinion on SCSI hard drives...I've noticed that most (if not all) SCSI adapters are PCI cards, which I imagine would contribute to these PCI overflow problems that I seem to be hearing so much about (mine were ended after disabling the extra visual fx in Windows XP).

My problem is that I'm constantly running into ASIO problems in Logic...for the record, here's my setup:

P3 800
512 MB Ram (PC 133)
Pulsar 1
Windows XP
2 Western Digital Hard Drives (7200 RPM ATA 100)(not in any kind of RAID setup)
Matrox video card
Logic 4.81
Asus TUSL2-c mobo
Plextor CD writer

I've got 28 tracks of Audio in my current song, and 17 effects spread throughout them. I need at least 50-60 tracks. I usually use my D drive for all of my audio files...although I've just recently tried moving half of the files to the C drive in an attempt to increase Disk I/O. Apparently, to no avail.

Does anyone know where my bottleneck is? I know that I've got an imperfect system--I'm going to build a second computer dedicated entirely to audio. Will SCSI help me, or will the increased information transfer be limited by the PCI Bus? What's the point of having Ultra 2 SCSI (with 160 MByte/s transfer rate) if it's constrained? Am I missing something? Is there such a thing as a mobo with a dedicated SCSI bus?

Can anyone out there enlighten me?

Thanks

SCSI could even make your situation worse. On my Acorp 6A815EPD (I guess you have about the same chipset, i815EP), IDE + USB and PCI slots + RAID are on different PCI busses.
A fast IDE drive should meet your requirements. I think your hardware config is ok.

What recording software do you use, what are your cache/memory settings? What bitdepth do you record?

Did you check the optimisations in Tips and tricks? Follow that checklist and take into account your needs. If the problem persists, then come again.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: atomic on 2002-02-18 03:40 ]</font>

Hey Atomic,

Thanks for the quick reply...I've gone through most of the optimizations in the Tips & Tricks section (and I thank all of you for your advice). I couldn't find an option to enable DMA in the device manager, so I went online to find drivers direct form the manufacturer of my hard drives. On the website, it says that the utilities that (I presume) are used to optimize the hard drive performance don't work for NT, 2000, or XP. Lame. So I installed Intel Application Accelerator, and am kind of in limbo right now.

In my device manager, there are 3 things listed beneath IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers: Intel 82801BA Ultra ATA Controller, Primary IDE Channel, and Secondary IDE Channel. I'm considering removing the driver for the Primary IDE Channel driver---is this the notorious Microsoft generic ATA controller? Will I be able to enable DMA after getting rid of this, or will my computer crash and my blood pressure rise to the point that it shoots out of my eye sockets?

As far as the bit depth, I'm currently recording at 16 bit. I did notice an increase in performance when I went from 32 ASIO channels to 16. The samplerate is 44.1 khz

As far as Cache settings go, I'm probably using whatever the computer defaulted to when it discovered my PIII processor (it seemed to set everything else up correctly as far as bus speed and multiplier). Is it better to have that higher or lower? Should I disable it?

For recording purposes, I almost expressly use Logic 4.81. I occasionally use Sound Forge 5, but that's only when I'm mixing CDs or just messing around.

I'm going to going digging around for some more knowledge. Thanks for the help!