18 Mar
2003
18 Mar
'03
7:28 p.m.
Hi guys! (and gals).
I am looking into building a new machine, and I want to do some
home-studio
recording with it. I was hoping that some of you could lend some of your
expert advice.
It sounds like SCSI is pretty-much a must in these situations,
true? What
I was wondering about in particular is if anyone has tried anything like
this: Setting up a machine with an IDE hard drive to hold the
system files
(say an ata 133 7200 rpm...) and a scsi disk for the dumping
ground of the
audio programs such as ecasound, audacity or Ardour. I think I would put
the swap partition on the scsi drive as well. Obviously I am trying to
save a little money here, and I am trying to minimize latency. (I think
that somewhere around the $2K mark is my limit.) I am accustomed
to using
multitrack analog units, but digital/computer recording is still
extremely
new to me.
Any thoughts on this?
I would also love to hear any suggestions regarding what disks,
motherboards, cases and heatsinks people recommend and have had luck with.
Thanks!
Chris
Chris,
Hi. I think you can do this for less money. I just built a new machine
last weekend for way less than half what your considering spending, but I
had a few bits laying around. Some of what I got is even a bit over the top.
You don't need to go so far. Try this for starters:
-Cooler Master Case $150
-Antec 365-FCA Power Supply (Manual Fan) $ 80
-Asus - A7V333-X $ 70
-AMD - Athlon Thoroughbred XP 2600+ $250
-DDR-SDRAM PC2700 - Crucial 512MB $ 80
-Thermal Take Technology - Volcano 9 CoolMod $ 26
-Lite-On 48x CD-RW $ 60
-Sony Floppy $ 16
-Radeon 9000-64MB $ 69
----
$801
-ATA-133 80GB (2MB Cache) System Drive $ 80
-1394 OHCI Controller $ 40
-1394 Maxtor DV rated external drive $200
-RME HDSP 9652 26 Channel + MIDI $450
----
$770
The stuff at the top I purchased. The stuff near the bottom (Or similar to
it) I already had.
This machine is running RH 8.0 and the PlanetCCRMA flow. Everything works
fine (so far) other than the current Planet kernel cannot enable DMA on my
system drive. I expect to have this solved later this week.
You can probably keep this down around $1K-$1.1K if you just go with a
second internal ATA-133 drive on the second IDE channel and share it with
the CD-RW drive. You can always convert it to 1394 later. Just by an ADS
Pyro drive case for $80.