The Logic Off Topic list

Ed Tarantino wrote:

>Finally, will a raid 0 striping setup for audio drives help 
>performance or cause potential problems? (drop outs, etc?)
>
>(I'm running win2000, NTFS with late model IBM and Maxtor IDE 
>drives.. my mobo has onboard raid, hence the question)

RAID level 0 increases disk read and write performance and increases drive
size -- and is very commonly used for video editing . Most audio people get
so many tracks from a 7200 RPM drive they hardly need the extra performance
obtainable with RAID 0. If you were doing  a lot of tracks at 24/96 you
might like the extra head room and perhaps spooling samples up from virtual
memory might benefit too EXS24/GigaStudio. 

The common or garden ATA 100 controller in most Intel /VIA/ SIS etc
chipsets for Athlon/P4 is not sitting on the PCI bus. It is usually in the
south bridge chip so it is not contending with your audio card for PCI
bandwidth. When you buy a board with a low budget Promise or Highpoint RAID
controller or even put one of the good  ones (eg 3Ware's Escalade units or
the Adaptec ATA RAID cards) in a PCI slot,  all the traffic to your RAID
drives or anything else using those ports runs over the PCI bus. Depending
on the drivers etc and whether they play nicely with other cards on the PCI
bus you could get conceivably get clicks. However, many on PC-DAW seem to
be using them without any audio related problems

I suggest you ask on that list: PCDAW@yahoogroups.com

There are quite a few people knowledgable about PC hardware for DAWs there.

A word of warning:  There was a great horror story earlier this month on
PC-DAW written by an Italian guy who lost a  Highpoint RAID 0+1 setup
because he disconnected the power to one of the array drives temporarily
(because he needed to copy some data from another drive). He lost the
entire array -- 76 Gig of data including entire projects for clients and
all his own stuff. The responses blamed Highpoint so watch out if you go
this route.

Regards,
Murray