After archiving my audio, I reformatted everything and started clean.
I decided to record to my external FW drive. I formatted as NTFS with
a disk allocation of 2048.
Put my VST instruments on an internal drive, seperate from my OS
drive.

I essentially formatted all of the drives dealing with audio with an
allocation 2048.

Applying an effect to an audio clip now takes way longer. compare 5
seconds to 30 seconds.

My VST instruments' banks also take longer to load.

Essentially, the performance is quite different than previous, where
the VSTI's where on the external FW, and audio was recorded directly
to the C:\ drive.

Previously, disk allocation was set to "optimum" or whatever default
that windows had, and there was no problem. I specified an allocation
of 2048, thinking that it would be beneficial if the computer didnt
have to refer to the drive so many times for a file.

Is this allocation simply too high, or am I missing something else?

Also, what are your experiences with recording to an external firewire
drive? Is it more efficient than recording to an internal harddrive,
seperate from the OS drive?


specs [at the moment]:

2.4Ghz
1 gig RAM
40Gig hard drive [for OS and other progs]
6 Gig for audio programs
120 Gig FW for recording audio

Gyakuen,

I use a disc allocation of 32k and it works great.

-Chris

"Gyakuen" wrote in message
...
After archiving my audio, I reformatted everything and started clean.
I decided to record to my external FW drive. I formatted as NTFS with
a disk allocation of 2048.
Put my VST instruments on an internal drive, seperate from my OS
drive.

I essentially formatted all of the drives dealing with audio with an
allocation 2048.

Applying an effect to an audio clip now takes way longer. compare 5
seconds to 30 seconds.

My VST instruments' banks also take longer to load.

Essentially, the performance is quite different than previous, where
the VSTI's where on the external FW, and audio was recorded directly
to the C:\ drive.

Previously, disk allocation was set to "optimum" or whatever default
that windows had, and there was no problem. I specified an allocation
of 2048, thinking that it would be beneficial if the computer didnt
have to refer to the drive so many times for a file.

Is this allocation simply too high, or am I missing something else?

Also, what are your experiences with recording to an external firewire
drive? Is it more efficient than recording to an internal harddrive,
seperate from the OS drive?


specs [at the moment]:

2.4Ghz
1 gig RAM
40Gig hard drive [for OS and other progs]
6 Gig for audio programs
120 Gig FW for recording audio

Gyakuen wrote in message . ..


Is this allocation simply too high, or am I missing something else?

Way too low. 32 or 64k clusters for a 120G drive, especially if only
dealing with large files.


Also, what are your experiences with recording to an external firewire
drive? Is it more efficient than recording to an internal harddrive,
seperate from the OS drive?


specs [at the moment]:

2.4Ghz
1 gig RAM
40Gig hard drive [for OS and other progs]
6 Gig for audio programs
120 Gig FW for recording audio

Partitioning one drive like you did isn't really going to give you any
advantages, in fact it's likeli that it will decrease the performance.
Split one into a system/program partition and an archive partition if
you want (convenience only, in case you have to reformat) and don't
use any part of that drive for samples or recording. Firewire works,
certainly the bus is fast enough. What you have inside the enclosure
is another story, but if it's a 120G drive, it's most likely good
enough. In my experience, it's less reliable than dedicated IDE or
SCSI drives, but not much. You can test the relative "speed" very
easily by taking the drive out of the FW enclosure and putting it
inside the box (mind the master/slave jumpers!). You will probably
find that you're limited by the transfer rate of the drive, which is
not likely to exceed the FW bus speed.

--Vasily

In article ,
Gyakuen wrote:
After archiving my audio, I reformatted everything and started clean.
I decided to record to my external FW drive. I formatted as NTFS with
a disk allocation of 2048.
Put my VST instruments on an internal drive, seperate from my OS
drive.

I essentially formatted all of the drives dealing with audio with an
allocation 2048.

Applying an effect to an audio clip now takes way longer. compare 5
seconds to 30 seconds.

My VST instruments' banks also take longer to load.

Essentially, the performance is quite different than previous, where
the VSTI's where on the external FW, and audio was recorded directly
to the C:\ drive.
[snip]
Also, what are your experiences with recording to an external firewire
drive? Is it more efficient than recording to an internal harddrive,
seperate from the OS drive?
specs [at the moment]:

2.4Ghz
1 gig RAM
40Gig hard drive [for OS and other progs]
6 Gig for audio programs
120 Gig FW for recording audio

FireWire sucks down a lot of CPU power and depending on the chipset in
the drive box, the adapter card chipset and the drivers you're using,
you can still get not-so-great performance despite the heavy CPU load.

It can be no faster than using an IDE drive since it's extra stuff
layered on top of IDE drives. If you can tell, I'm not a big fan of
FireWire and i think it's very overrated. I think the best use of it is
for nearline backups and for sneakernetting sessions from one studio to
another. Online use of FW as a record and edit drive makes no sense to
me.

BTW, if you use it as a nearline backup or as an interchange medium,
please make sure to verify the data you copy. Some of the modern
fanless FW drive enclosures needlessly cook the drive and you end up
with errors when the copy takes a long time (i.e. with a session that is
anything more than a GB or two). On the Mac, I use Toast to compare the
data and I bet there's something equivalent for Windows that can compare
each file in a directory tree against the source tree to detect errors.


Best of luck with your system,

Monte McGuire