Audio PC hard drives?

Question

Whats the reason for two hard drives in an audio pc

Answer 1

My guess would be one is a back up drive.

If it's for editing audio the hard drives are most likely set up as a raid configuration so that editing processes is much faster than a computer running one single hard drive, much like a high spec video editing machine.

The harddrive is the slowest component in the pc today. When saving and loading from the harddisk it can take a long time to get the information from or put the information on the hard drive.

When you use a raid configuration the data is broken up over two hard drives (RAID Stripping), and thus saving and loading can be done in half the time.

Answer 2

The reason why a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) would have more than one hard drive is to improve system performance. The idea is to have one drive with your OS and applications on it, and the other for recording audio onto. This optimises the recording capability of the system. I'll explain how.

Hard drives can only transmit a limited amount of data at any one time. The system drive in it normal operation is in constant use by the computer, and as such it part all of it's bandwith cannot be used for the recording audio. This limits the total number of symiltanious recording tracks that the drive can handle. Also, as the demands on the drive increase, the system will slow as the systems ability to access the drive become strained.

Hence the second drive. The system can do what it wants on its own drive, and the audio recording software can have the full capability of it's dedicated drive.

The only time that you would consider striping drives together into a RAID array is if you have three of more drives. The system disk would stand alone with the additional drives stripped togther. I would not run a RAID of just two drives that include the system drive, as there would be no real performance gain by doing things this way.

My current DAW has six 10,000rpm drives on an internal RAID system, with the system disk on it's own. The RAID is also backed up by an external tape drive. I have done it this way for safety, as with a stripped array, if one drive fails you can loose all your data. The performance is outstanding.

I hope this has answered you question

Regards A

Answer 3

No offense, yet in case you do no longer understand what you're able to desire to do you in all threat should not be reformatting your pc. i do no longer advise this in a bad way, in spite of the easy actuality that that's as though I mentioned "I took off my spark plug cables, and that i replace into rebuilding my engine, now what might desire to I do?". once you're particular you want to reformat it, you want as nicely in a secure mode, ideally directly to a DOS disk with the format utility on it. then you quite genuinely can reformat without concern of interference.