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  3. How important is the Average Seek Time of a hard drive?

  • How important is the Average Seek Time of a hard drive?

    D
    D

    I just bought two 500gb seagate SATA drives with ave seek time of 11ms.

    It was by accident, I assumed that the drives had 8.4ms ave seek time

    because I was looking at similar drives and forgot to check the tech specs

    until after I made the purchase.

    Anyway, I placed another order for the correct drives so I am getting 4 drives

    in a few days. Only need 2.

    Just wanted to ask if there was a huge difference between the 8.4ms and 11ms drives.

    I'm gonna return the 11ms ones, they were only $20 cheaper, no big deal. 

    But if I decide to keep them would that be a bad a idea for streaming samples and VI's?

    Thanks,

    David 
  • P
    P

    Which model series did you order? 7200.9 or 7200.10 or 7200.11? My guess it shouldn't matter that much at all and certainly not worth $20 to me. For $40 you could already buy half a 3rd drive and you get much more polyphony from that. It may well be that you have to vary slightly with the amount of preloaded sample pool into RAM within a few kb or will hit the maximum polyphony you could get out of a drive a bit earlier, but it should not be substantial. We're not talking 5400rpm or 10,000rpm drives here.

    All the best,

    PolarBear 
  • D
    D
    Thanks for your response PolarBear! I ultimately wound up with two 500gb 7200rpm 7200.10 drives. They have 8.5ms AST. The other ones that I accidently ordered were 11ms. I figured that was quite a difference when streaming lots of samples as we all are with VSL. My next questions is should I do a RAID or not? I was going to put the Sym Cube + Elements + App Strings across the 2 drives with a balance of "always used" and "rarely used" collections on both drives so that one drive is not working harder than the other during playback. For example I won't put Orch I and II on the same drive. Any input on RAIDing these drives? Thanks, David
  • P
    P

    Just feeding some links as I don't have much RAID experience myself and it is controversely discussed:

    http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/p/6862/50481.aspx

    http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/t/16335.aspx

    http://community.vsl.co.at/forums/t/14795.aspx 
  • D
    D
    Thanks! Will check it out. David