[LAU] Which SATA drive? Size? [Was: Re: partition table]

[Brent Busby]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Ivan K wrote:

> I was surprised to hear that so many people write their audio files to 
> a second drive.  I always thought that most audio people preferred as 
> few drives as possible in a system to keep noise down.

SATA drives make almost no noise.  You'll get more noise from your 
processor and power supply fan than you ever will from even five or six 
SATA disks.

> On a somewhat related topic, is there a brand of SATA drive that 
> people recommend as far as reliability, speed, and low noise?

I've never gone wrong with Seagate.  I've had lots of problems over the 
years with Western Digital.  However, see recent threads about getting 
even more performance by recording to ramdisk/memory, provided you're 
secure about the stability of your system and your UPS/electrical supply 
(and you don't think it's going to crash or lose power during 
recording).  Nothing will beat a ramdisk for performance.

> Also, even though Terabyte drives are inexpensive these days, would a 
> 500 GB drive be better as far as speed (reading/writing) than a 1 TB 
> drive?  (I really would not need a full TB anyways).

I haven't noticed any significant perfomance dropoff until you start 
talking about the new 2TB drives.  Those seem a little slow.  The 1.5TB 
drives are pretty fast as long as you be sure to get one with 7200rpm 
spindle speed.  They're starting to sell slower ones again, so you have 
to look for that now.  (Up until recently, they used to almost all be 
7200rpm.)

> P.S.
> My current Seagate 76GB SCSI drive just died and rather continue to 
> buy SCSI and buy high priced drives that are smaller compared to the 
> recent SATA drives available, I thought I would buy a SATA for my 
> current system as well as an new system this time.

SCSI hard drives are noisy and expensive!  I used to record on a SCSI 
setup myself.  Those are loud drives.  You won't believe how much 
quieter SATA is.  It's true that SATA has slightly higher CPU usage, but 
it's still nowhere near as bad as regular EIDE drives used to be for 
that.  SATA gives performance almost as good as SCSI, but much quieter, 
much cheaper, and much bigger disk sizes.  The only thing I miss about 
SCSI is that long ago when I was an Amiga user, it promised to be the 
universal bus:  Your hard drives ran on it, your CDROM, your scanner, 
your tape drive, your zip drive...and because most of the standards were 
part of the SCSI protocol itself, you didn't even need OS driver support 
for most things.  (Amiga users survived on that fact.)  Now I think the 
universal bus has become USB...which isn't quite the same thing.

I now only use SCSI for an old but great SCSI scanner that I refuse to 
give up.

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky