HYPER DRIVES

May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Doug Eisengrein

Arguably the single most critical piece of gear in a computer-centric studio — yet perhaps the most underrated, undervalued and unsexy — is the hard drive. Unless there is a hard-disk emergency, such as a complete meltdown or a show-stopping performance lag, we don't pay enough mind to our studios' central nervous systems. You have probably crashed your computer a few — or many — times. That's frustrating, but no huge deal. However, have you ever suffered a fried hard drive, resulting in all of your precious audio and other data going down the tubes? Before such a problem rears its ugly head, get up to speed with the blandest, yet most indispensable, item in the modern studio.

DEFENSIVE DRIVING

Make basic hard-drive maintenance part of your routine: regular disk defragmentation, periodic removal and gentle reseating of internal drives, keeping up with the latest operating system, firewall and browser upgrades (especially critical security patches) and the general avoidance of manhandling your computer. But even the most expensive hard drives can fail, so to avoid the nightmare of losing all of your music and other irreplaceable data, perform regularly scheduled backups to a separate drive or other storage media. For example, you could simply burn all of your “new-since-last-backup” files to DVD-R or Flash drive once every week. You could take the next step of using software that creates exact disk images of your hard drive onto a separate, external drive. A potentially better approach is to sign up for an online backup service. Many such free or inexpensive sites exist, such as Box.net, where users can drag-and-drop important files and — voilà — they are saved to a remote location. Better still, robust services such as Mozy (http://mozy.com) automate the entire process of performing scheduled, online backups of your local drives. The key here is that your copies are stored remotely.

INNIE OR OUTIE?

Desktop and laptop hard disks can be roughly categorized into two types: internal and external. Those can be further broken down into different categories, depending on their interfaces, speed and, of course, storage capacity. The majority of modern PC and laptop internal hard drives are connected via PATA or SATA interfaces, and (to a lesser degree) SCSI or SAS. The interface acronym ATA is often used interchangeably with the earlier terms IDE or EIDE (Enhanced IDE). More specifically, PATA, or Parallel ATA, is a standard that connects as many as two hard drives to a motherboard via 40-pin ribbon cables. If two hard drives (the maximum per PATA bus) are connected, they are configured as “master” and “slave.” The SATA (Serial ATA) type is fast becoming a newer standard. With SATA, the master-slave relationship doesn't apply, and faster disk speeds such as 10,000 rpm are widely available, making for an overall better drive option. SCSI or the newer SAS interfaces are most often found on servers rather than PCs. SCSI drives with ultrahigh rpm speeds are also readily available. External (typically portable) drives are usually connected via USB or FireWire and sometimes include multiple interfacing options, such as combinations of USB 1.1 (the slowest), USB 2, FireWire 400 or FireWire 800 (which is the newest and fastest — though least implemented). FireWire is Apple Computer's proprietary name for the IEEE 1394 interface; some PCs' and peripherals' packaging may still use IEEE 1394.

FORGET BPM — IT'S ALL ABOUT RPM

System performance is critical for any serious production studio, and aside from interface type and the computer's native bus speed, two of the most important factors that determine hard-drive performance are cache size and rpm speed. Generally, the larger the cache and the faster the rpm rating, the better a hard disk will perform. The majority of hard drives are 7,200 rpm (acceptable for audio production), and caches typically range from 2 to 16 MB, with 8 MB being a good start. Some less-expensive machines — laptops in particular — have a 5,400 rpm drive preinstalled. For heavy audio work, this won't do in the long run. The emerging standard for desktops, SATA drives, can spin as fast as 10,000 rpm, though these are far less common than the typical 7,200. The best laptop drives are usually 7,200 rpm, and you shouldn't settle for less. If you can afford one of the supercharged drives as a secondary data drive, or if you're savvy enough to install one as your boot drive (that involves reinstalling your operating system), you'll be in good shape. I highly recommend a 10,000 rpm/8 MB (or higher) cache hard drive if your computer accepts it.

GET OFF THE BUS

Although it's technically possible to chain FireWire and USB devices together, it's important to consider available bandwidth — especially if you're a heavy multitrack composer. I recommend being picky about your USB and FireWire bus usage. When using external gear, you should avoid chaining devices together on the same bus — especially hard drives and audio interfaces, which are major bandwidth hogs. Imagine water going through a pipe when you turn the faucet on just little bit. When you turn the faucet all the way, there's a lot more water trying to move through the same pipe. This is what happens when you try to cram too much data through a single bus or cable. The “pipe” won't burst; instead, there will be a backup at the source, sometimes causing audio dropouts or even temporary gear failure. The first step is to place your hard drive and audio interface on different USB or FireWire connectors. Just because the physical port is different, that doesn't mean the bus it lives on is isolated. Research how to do it first, and then check inside your system to see if each connection point shares an internal bus with another. Then adjust your gear connections accordingly. Computers often don't sport enough physical ports for musicians. If your gear must share, isolate that hard drive and let your MIDI controllers, mice, audio interfaces and other peripherals gang up on another bus. Your data and overall performance are worth it.