system overhaul

[starfinger]

hey guys,
i'm rebuilding my audio machine and I have two decisions I'm debating:

1) should I or should I not enable hyperthreading?

2) should I install sample libraries on my audio disk or system disk?

I'm going to do research of my own in parallel, but I thought I would throw this out there.

thanks!
-craig

[catch]

1) should I or should I not enable hyperthreading?

I don't think the nature of digital recording would benefit from hyper-threading. In fact, it may be harmed by it. Also, I'm pretty sure some recording suites don't even work if hyper-threading is enabled.

2) should I install sample libraries on my audio disk or system disk?

I'd go with the system disc. Reasons being a) defrag or cluster size or whatever shouldn't matter so much when assembling beats but b) it will affect audio recording. Keeping the samples off the audio disc will mean a potentially smaller audio disc and quicker defrag.

[deshead]

In general, once your audio app is loaded in memory, there'll be limited access of the system disk. So it makes sense to put your sample libraries there.

There are (at least) two caveats:
1) This only applies if you have physically separate disk drives. If it just a songle disk that's partitioned into multiple drives, then it doesn't matter to performance where anything is stored.
2) If you have limited RAM (less than 512Mb), then the O/S is going to do more paging. In that case, the system disk (assuming that's where you have the swap file, which you should) will be very busy. So I wouldn't use it for anything else.

[HeuristicsInc]

Since my system disk was making those nasty nasty noises, I put in a new one and took this opportunity to move all my music stuff off of it and onto the media disk. Dunno why I didn't do this before, guess just lazy.
I just hate having to re-install everything... and here Starfinger is doing it on purpose!
-bill

[starfinger]

the verdict -- hyperthreading enabled/ samples on system disk.

I've had hyperthreading on for a while now, and haven't had any obvious problems. Some reading indicates that apps specifically written for multi cpus will benefit from this, so I'm keeping it on (expecting a multi-cpu update for my main host sw within the next few months)

Paging won't be an issue since I'm probably going to disable VM altogether. And I'd just as soon not let sample disk streaming impact my audio track count.

Thanks!
-craig

[starfinger]

oh.. the reason I'm doing this is that up until now my 2 HD's have been in a Raid 0 configuration, and I'm going to separate them out.

While the RAID does give improved sequential read/write speed, it's making the whole thing act like a system disk, and as the current xp installation has aged, the whole thing has been acting more crappy.

The positive twist on all this is that I'm cataloging all my music software and serial numbers, so that future installations of this type will go smoothly. The OS installation will just be part of my configuration, and not the crumbling bedrock of the rest of my system.

or something like that.

-craig